When writing my essays or analyses, I do not draft them on a computer, that process is for later when or if I decide to post the article here.
My metrical analyses are always hand written due to the use of the breve and macron. For my initial drafts this process is a lot faster and easier to change. The typing into a markdown document is time consuming, but with some special snippets I can easily produce the characters I need for the scansion.
However, essays are always done using a manual typewriter. It may seem a bit odd to be using these machines now, but they do have their advantages. Ideas freely flow without any distractions from other things. The carriage moving, the ding of the bell and the pressing of keys all become very satisfying. Later I can scan the document and edit it for posting.
Anyway, I was wondering if I could use my typewriter to represent my scansion, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was possible, at least on this typewriter. It has a number of diacritics, but the breve and macron are not present. Playing around a bit, I noticed that using the grave and acute would give me something that looked very much like the breve and rolling the platen down and using the underscore gave me the macron.
Of course there is no vertical line to represent the pipe for separating the feet, but the slash does do the job. As much fun as this was, I would not use it very often as it is extremely time consuming and not worth the effort. Also the scanning does not work well.
Irrespective, it still gets the job done!