I was going to suggest this. Religious themes and issues of learning curve aside, I find emacs is the perfect text-editor for my needs. (Emphasis on my needs).
I have disabled the scrollbar, menubar, and toolbar. Full screen it and you have black and white. Nothing else. Combine that with some really great text manipulation features/shorcuts and you have an awesome text editor for anything you want.
And it can even do spell-checking and all that other fancy stuff.
As for the whole "what about sending documents to non techies" issue: It doesn't seem to apply for this article since he can write the whole thing in emacs and then send the final copy to his editor after copying and pasting into Word.
copy & pasting only works if you don't have any markup to transfer.
There's usually some intermediate format that you could, say, write in Emacs and use markdown or asciidoc or latex, compile to html or rtf or whatever, and then import into Word.
http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-em...