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Word, and what a page without a ribbon is for.
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Almost nobody chooses Microsoft Word. It is where writing happens because it is where writing has always happened, and because it is what the person on the other end asked for. That is a good enough reason, and it is worth being clear that this is not an argument for abandoning it. It is an argument about which part of the work it is for.
Minimal Writer is not a replacement for everything Word does. It is an alternative for the part that comes before formatting, track changes and collaboration: writing the draft. What follows is where that line falls, and where it does not.
Word is a document producer. Its job is to make a file that another person opens, marks up, comments on and signs off — track changes, page layout, headers, styles, the whole apparatus of a thing that has to look a particular way for somebody else. Every one of those is on screen while you write, because the tool cannot know which minute you are in.
The problem is the hours before the document exists
A first draft is not a document. It has no layout to get right, no reviewer, no formatting anybody is waiting on. What it has is a blank page and the difficulty of putting the next true sentence on it — and the two dozen controls arranged around that page are all answers to questions you do not have yet.
None of them is loud on its own. Together they are a steady, low invitation to fiddle: to fix the spacing, to try the heading in a different weight, to do anything at all other than write the next paragraph. Formatting is the most comfortable form of procrastination ever invented, and it is always one click away.
What this does instead
There is one page and no ribbon. Headings, emphasis, lists and quotes are typed rather than clicked, so the shape of the text never costs you the cadence of the sentence. The writing modes narrow the lit part of the page to the paragraph or the single sentence you are on, and hold that line in the middle of the screen while the rest moves — your eyes stay still and the text travels past them.
Underneath, the things that make a long piece survivable are on by default rather than configured: every keystroke saved to your own machine first and synced after, snapshots taken as you work so an hour that went wrong can be undone, and an outline of the document by its headings that you can drag a section around in.
And when it does have to be a document
Then it goes to Word, and that is the intended ending rather than a defeat. RTF exports on any plan and Pro adds .docx and PDF, so the draft arrives in the format your editor, your supervisor or your client asked for, and the marking up happens where marking up belongs. Import runs the same way round: an existing .docx comes in with its headings, emphasis, lists and links intact.
What does not survive the trip is page layout, and that is deliberate — there is no page layout here to put it in. Nor is there track changes, comments or a second cursor: this is a place for one person to write, not a place for a document to be reviewed.
Which one to pick
If the work is collaborative from the start — a contract being redlined, a report three people are editing, anything living in track changes — stay in Word. Nothing here does that job, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
If the hard part is producing the text in the first place, and Word is simply where you have always ended up, write the draft somewhere quieter and hand over the .docx at the end. That is the whole proposition — and it is how an essay gets from lecture notes to a finished filewithout the formatting being touched until it matters.