Thanks for your reply.
I’m working my way through the list of plugins you pointed to,
but so far they all do far more than I want.
I have been keeping an impersonal diary –
mainly reminders to myself of how to do things –
for several years, using the standard Unix text editor vi.
The result is not elegant, but is easy to search through,
using grep.
Having gone over to WordPress for several weeks,
I find it much more time-consuming to make entries,
and am wondering now if it is worth pursuing this option.
The reason, incidentally, why I went over to WP
was that I have a number of computers which I use
at different times,
so a web-based system seemed worth looking into.
I am a mathematician, and use LaTeX quite a lot.
Surprisingly, I find writing LaTeX
much simpler than any WP editor I have tried.
It seems my needs are not those of the usual WP user.
I want above all to be able to make quick entries,
which will only invoke the simplest of HTML tags –
for example, I’d like a blank line to produce </p><p>.
I’d also like it to be as simple as possible
to cut-and-paste from items I read,
in newsgroups or email or on the web.
Maybe WordPress is not for me –
basically, I am not a blogger
but am simply looking for an easy way to make personal notes.
Anyway, I’ll go back to looking through the suggested plugins,
but as I said these all seem to be trying to make
various complicated tasks easy,
while I am looking for the opposite,
something to make trivial tasks trivial.