I really like the idea of writing in a text editor, and have tried to do so many times in Vim, but for some reason it's very important for me to see the result as it will appear to the reader as I'm writing. I don't know why this is, it just happens. When I'm in a WYSIWYG word processor with the typography mostly figured out, everything goes smoothly.
Likewise, when I write a post on web forums, Facebook, HN, etc., I need to publish it first before I can properly edit. Seeing the post in context is somehow important.
You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so.
When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like
$ make output.pdf
$ xpdf -remote projectname output.pdf & while inotifywait -e modify **/* ; do make output.pdf; xpdf -remote projectname -reload; done
Then any time I changed a figure or a tex file or an embedded screenshot or whatever (any transitive dependency of output.pdf), make would rebuild it and display the result. xpdf nicely does not change the scroll position (even a little bit), so this gave me a rather nice nearly-real-time WYSIWYG view.
My $EDITOR at the time was vim and it never entered my head to try to contrive automatic saving every time I paused typing or something like that, but that seems like a fun idea.
I am the total opposite. Seeing the result as I write feels just annoyingly distracting. The unpredictability of the jump to the next line is what I dislike the most.
Obviously I do look at the final formatting and possibly tweak it, just not at the same time I edit the text.
Obvious disclaimer: I do not think that this is "better", I'm just providing a different data point.
Likewise, when I write a post on web forums, Facebook, HN, etc., I need to publish it first before I can properly edit. Seeing the post in context is somehow important.