Apart from LaTeX there some alternatives available. Especially the markdown format has the potential to replace existing Latex workflow with a thinner alternative. The screenshot shows how a textfile is edited. To make the section visible, the gedit program was improved with a outline plugin which allows to jump to each section in the text. Combined with the internal spell checking feature, this will emulate the standard Lyx editor very well. Even if the document format is not LaTeX, the workflow shares many similarities. It is very easy to create longer documents.