Regarding https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/POSTING-en.html: I remember using Star $Something back in the days. I don’t remember the exact name anymore and none of the screenshots of StarOffice look familiar. Hmm. I have a green UI in mind. Not sure if I completely hallucinate it or whether that was actually the case. It was a commercial software, not freeware, we had to buy it, I think.

My first LaTeX distribution was MiKTeX with – if I remember correctly – the TeXNicCenter. A bit later on Linux I used Kile as my LaTeX editor. LaTeX produces the worst error messages I’ve ever come across. So compile early and often. But the results are amazing.

I know people who never make use of headings and the like to this day. Bold, italics, underline etc. is all they use. Despite writing larger documents. Admittedly, it took me a while to figure out and appreciate all the advantages of actually marking up the document structure properly.

These days I rarely reach for LaTeX or LibreOffice to craft new stuff in my private life. Simple text files is usually it. RST and Markdown if it has to be more fancy.