It's amazing what you can find with a few "apt-cache search" commands...

WordGrinder says it's a "word processor for processing words". It's a terminal application with a textual UI. Yes, it honours terminal background colours, so I get a nice white-on-blue WordPerfect 5.1-esque experience. No fancy formatting. Paragraphs separated by one blank line. Can do UTF-8. It also supports putting multiple documents in one file.

In short, it looks like the perfect environment that I've been crying for. WYSIWYG software these days seems to be more about a bad attempt at typesetting than actually processing words.

So what am I waiting for? Um... I need it running on Debian 4.0 and also on Linux tty (the program doesn't seem to work all that well on a Latin-1 xterm, so I suppose it won't work too well on the equally Latin-1-hostile setup on my old laptop).

Also, I looked at the file saved by the application and almost posted the whole thing to thedailywtf.com. I'd prefer to have my stuff in a format that you can fix with the proverbial "vi and toothpick".

Yet, it looks quite promising! *sigh* for now, time to get back to the regularly scheduled xemacs21'ing until this software matures a bit...