The best thing on my Windows box was my UNIX utilities. Until Win10 went to 64 bits and don't allow them (or any other 16-bit programs) to run. When Windows screwed up its search utility (worked great and saved me many times up to XP, but wouldn't work starting with Win7) it was grep that kept me sane.
Most of my writing is text using a third party editor, Note Tab Pro. I only use Word for a few things, like forms I've created and my study notes for Russian. I remember from a C programming forum I mentored on someone getting errors on a short program that looked fine ... except there was something odd about that double quote symbol. It turned out that he had written the source code in a word processor, so I advised him to never do that again but rather always use a text editor for coding. On my brother-in-law's eMac, I was surprised to find a text editor, but I had to dig really deep to find it. When I mentioned it to him, he couldn't begin to imagine why anyone would need one (he's a PhD).
One of my first word processors was WordPerfect which I loved and sorely miss. You could go into reveal mode and see the embedded formatting codes and even edit them directly to fix any problem. You cannot do that in Word.