For the use case of prose, this is a great alternative to the time investment needed to take up a heavyweight editor (e.g. Emacs or Vim) that can be made to operate on a clause-by-clause, sentence-by-sentence basis, and I recommend it to anyone not interested in taking the plunge into "customization culture" or using the other features those programs provide. My writing, when I don't need to use Word for work (thanks to co-workers who use it for everything), tends to be done in something unobtrusive like nano or sandy[0] and looks much like the source from your second link, minus the HTML.

"Easy to edit," to take a phrase from your first link, is key.

[0]: http://tools.suckless.org/sandy