Markdown text format (variation of Wiki) is likely to have a bright future not only for open source projects (GitHub popularized the format for readme files) but for general purpose text as well.
Tracking changes line by line is much better with markdown than with typical text formats
like .DOC, .HTML etc... Generating web pages and dynamic styling is very easy.
Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined
Open source and free, for all major OSs; My preferred editor
Just save files as .md and use Ctrl-Shift-V for preview;
use split view for continuous preview
Atom
"A hackable text editorfor the 21st Century"
open source and free, for all major OSs
GitHub - atom/markdown-preview: Markdown preview in Atom
Markdown Monster - A better Markdown Editor for Windows
Windows "native" WPF, open source but not free app for editing Markdown files.
Getting Started with Markdown Monster - YouTube
interview with the author and links from:
Markdown Monster with Rick Strahl @ .NET Rocks! vNext
Daring Fireball: Markdown
CommonMark
standardization of the syntax, with changed name as response to objections by Markdown creator
"A strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown
What is Markdown?
It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet."
Word to Markdown Converter (online)
GitHub - lunet-io/markdig: A fast, powerful, CommonMark compliant, extensible Markdown processor for .NET
Ace - The High Performance Code Editor for the Web