The essay hits this and it’s a good point, regardless of domain: don’t let the tooling define the work.
This is where systems like LaTeX, markdown, plain text, a typewriter (if you’re so inclined), or pen excel. Remove the ability to distract yourself and focus on content. Presentation exists to bolster the prose. Don’t attempt to fill an arbitrary structure until you know what to say.
But my God is it hard to find anything non-distracting. I think MS Word is the best for me, but still. I would prefer Markdown, but this is just terrible for academia. I tried AsciiDoc, but again, nothing is more distracting than AsciiDoc, expect for the horrible, cruel syntax of LaTex. Scrivener is perfect, except, EXCEPT there is no integration with Zotero, or any reference manager. So I am left with MS Word, which is horrible for a 200 page file. Splitting up the file just clutters the workflow of browsing the whole document. I am trying to let go of tools, but there is no alternative fulfilling the minimal requirements.
Have you tried TeXmacs? It's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. It's WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1].
Have you tried LyX? It doesn't have all the advantages of plaintext and it's still easy to get distracted, but I find it's quite good at getting out of your way when you're not too worried about specific formatting, and it still has all the power of LaTeX when you need it.
Would separating the stages of making a document help at all?
A list of references (on paper?) then banging out a draft using anything at all and then editing the language, finally assembling the paper with its apparatus.
Disclaimer: I've never written anything as long as 200 pages
Yes, actually that's how I am working right now. But I was just doing a paper on the side just in Word with Zotero, and it really helps to have a reference manager.
I get your point on distraction-free writing and all the other tools. But for Pete's sake, calling "LaTex" distraction-free is a far stretch.
Lord knows how many endless hours I spent debugging and tweaking TikZ code (the LaTex graphics package) to fight obscure errors and missing dependencies and whatnot.
This is where systems like LaTeX, markdown, plain text, a typewriter (if you’re so inclined), or pen excel. Remove the ability to distract yourself and focus on content. Presentation exists to bolster the prose. Don’t attempt to fill an arbitrary structure until you know what to say.