LibreOffice - Writer

I like Writer as an free alternative to MS Word but only thing that I want in Writer and I miss from MS Word is a feature that automatically adds no-break space (or ALT+0160) after certain words (like prepositions and conjunctions). I like using Writer but I miss the no-break space feature from Word.

If rtf copy/pasting text formatting fails on WordPad for some strange reason, Libre Office will save you.

I hated this software due to its insistence on using the Liberation set of fonts and attempting to substitute them when opening anything created in any other WP or (especially) PDF app. This app would effectively fubar the document and no amount of tweaking would get it to work properly. I finally found the means to "hide" Liberation at the (Windows10) System level and now the app seems to respect the documents and not try to substitute fonts. All is not hunky-dory, however. Find/Replace with regular expressions just doesn't work even though it shows it should. In total, this is sometimes annoying software but it's free so you get what you pay for.

Edit (040225): Each iteration seems to provide improvements in quality and UI. Still have to deal with that damn "Liberation" font that seems to be used in no other app but insists upon being used here (and substituted); however, I've just removed the font from the system and changed the LO default font. Adding a star for its quality improvements otherwise.

LibreOffice Writer is the best WYSIWYG word processor if you don't require collaboration. It's very customizable and relatively lightweight compared to other similar word processors.

I remove a star due to recurrent bugs I've encountered. None have caused me to lose progress or significantly delay my work, but I typically encounter a new "quirk" every time I use Writer. It's a minor annoyance that is not present on other word processors, but the other benefits of LibreOffice Writer make it worthwhile.

It's the free and open source alternative to Microsoft Word, what more could you ask for?

flexible, has all the tools but is lightweight. Had trouble saving it to my Linux system though.