sigh I have a love-hate relationship with Scrivener.
A year or two ago I used an iPad Pro as my main (and only) computer, which was also the time I used Scrivener as my long-form writing app. Somebody mentioned above that the Scrivener mobile app is quite “lame”. I’d agree with this if compared to the desktop version, but I’d argue that mobile Scrivener is still perfectly usable on its own.
That was around the time I wrote this:
Since then, I’ve moved back to a Mac, and my opinion has completely reversed itself. Now I’m all in on Markdown.
Because of that, my long-form writing setup now consists of:
- (neo)vim (main text editor)
- Typora/Mark Text (helps to look at the markdown from new eyes)
- git (versioning and also to roll back the chaotic paragraphs I wrote at 3am)
- pandoc (converting markdown to PDF/DOCX and applying nice styling along the way, also processing citations as necessary)
That being said, I still come back to Scrivener on my Mac every once in a while. I’ve never bought it on desktop but their free trial is very flexible. I find that Scrivener is really good at helping me turn a scattered bunch of ideas into a cohesive piece of writing. +1 for the love of chunking expressed above, makes it easy to see if things are unnecessarily repeated or if they fit well together. A novelist friend also gets a lot of use out of it for organizing large fiction projects, which makes sense given that that’s what Scrivener is built for.
These things are harder to do with my vim and markdown setup, although I’m slowly tinkering to get all the parts. If there was something like Scrivener that worked with plain text I’d be all for it.
Sometimes I wonder if the answer is to stop overthinking, use Scrivener, and write more instead of thinking about my writing setup 
This post ended up much longer than I intended it to.