I tried a few word processors, none of them matches Mariner Write.

MS Word:

Good-looking word processor. Big, a lot of features (too much actually), but it requires a big amount of RAM, therefore it's pretty slow in scrolling, saving...it's not very responsive in anything really, when typing you'll notice a delay, words appear on the screen later than you had typed them.
And I don't like the application to do the thinking for me, ofcourse you can uncheck a lot of options in the preference panel, but it takes a while before you know how.
It crashes and freezes randomly...and it's expensive too.

AbiWord:

Great, free word processor. A handsom fellow too, but it doesn't render my personal default font Helvetica smoothly.
When typing there's a delay, when deleting text with some fonts (Helvetica for instance) it leaves artifacts behind and deleting with backspace takes forever.
Although it requires less memory than Word, it's not faster.

The same with Nisus Writer expres which has some font rendering problems too...overall these word processors are too slow and not very responsive.

I like Apple's TextEdit a lot: fast, flexible, but you cannot zoom the window (in page layout view) up to 150% or type a format manually, it goes from 128% (still too small) right up to 200% (too big)
Yes I can alter the screen resolution, using 800 x 600 instead of 1024 x 768, but a word processor must have a feature to alter the size to ones liking.

And then there's Mariner Write (3.6.5).
It's fast, almost as fast as TextEdit, it has a lot of features, more than I will ever use, but some common features I like TextEdit doesn't have, like Bullet, Indent in and out, tables etc.
It has the same beautiful font smoothing as TextEdit, without rendering problems AbiWord and Nisus Writer Express have.
It has a good spelling check and solid thesaurus (although Nisus Thesaurus (download it free!) is superior). It doesn't crash like Word, there isn't a delay when typing text (words appear on the screen at the same time you type them)...It does anything you like with ease and smoothly.
The appearance of the application itself isn't on par with Word or AbiWord, which look a lot sleaker, but who needs a great looking app when it's slow and unreliable?