Emacs for Writers (2015) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

by tarboreus • 8 years ago

99 24 8 years ago

krylon3• 8 years ago

I once tried to write a novel, and I used emacs, too. It was fun, at least the emacs part, but I was already a loyal emacs user at that point.

IMHO, Emacs is a very good text editor, and that is what writing is all about, is it not?

chipotle_coyote4• 8 years ago

It is, but unless you're doing it all on your own, writing a novel is also about working with editors and typesetters. (Or formatters, or whatever you want to call the typesetter equivalent for an ebook.) In my experience, at least in the fiction world, these folks are going to expect you to be using Microsoft Word, and you'd better have a tool that can generate Word-compatible files formatted to the industry standard -- and that supports Word-compatible comments and revision tracking well enough to "round trip" documents transparently.

I'm a big fan of open data formats and plain text markup, and I write a lot of fiction in Markdown. I love this notion in principle. But I suspect it's a lot easier to put into practice when everyone involved in your book's production is down with your toolchain -- which may mean everyone involved in your book's production is you.

(For the record, I convert the Markdown to rich text and do final formatting in Apple Pages for manuscripts that I'm submitting somewhere else. For novella-on-up length work, though, I'm one of those annoying Scrivener converts.)

nextos3• 8 years ago

With Pandoc you can convert from many formats to many other formats, including DOCX and PPTX.

Nothing prevents you from using Emacs, or Vi(m), write in Markdown, Org or whatever and deliver a DOCX.

The amazing thing is that you can even work with people that use Word track changes, while staying in Emacs, Vi(m) or any other text editor and using Pandoc.

krylon3• 8 years ago

I did not get to the point where I would have contacted a publishing house. I was just writing it for myself, mostly, so I had no restrictions/requirements imposed wrt file format. I used LaTeX and generated PDF from that.

gkya• 8 years ago

Org does export to ODT (not loaded by default), but the output reqquires tweaking.

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

That video helped me get Org Mode working in a usable way. It's worth spending a weekend on setting it up, especially capture templates.

ehudla2• 8 years ago

His emacs customization apparently: https://github.com/incandescentman/Emacs-Settings

melling• 8 years ago

I have several Emacs for Writers links in my GitHub notes:

https://github.com/melling/EditorNotes/blob/master/emacs.org

w0m• 8 years ago

I love vim but i want orgmod (or equiv..) badly. :(

I should bite the bullet and learn EVIL...

molloy• 8 years ago

There's really not much to learn!

mitchty• 8 years ago

I switched from vi/vim to emacs just for org mode. Took about a year but now I can't see going back. Its not that bad, and org mode is definitely worth it.

Elidrake24• 8 years ago

Spacemacs makes the transition nearly painless, I'd highly suggest it.

smashd• 8 years ago

I made the jump from Vim to Emacs about 6 months ago and org-mode was a major reason. It is very much worth it IMO. Evil supports all the Vim commands I was used to, and org-mode has been a revelation. It gave me that one place to put all my tasks, meeting notes, brainstorms, etc, and with useful workflows for keeping it cohesive. It took me an afternoon to get Emacs set up as my daily driver. It took longer (weeks/months) to dial in my org-mode workflow and knowledge to a point where I was satisfied with it, but org-mode was still a net improvement from day one. I continue to discover cool features in Emacs and org-mode on a regular basis. Don't wait, try it!

marbu• 8 years ago

Have you tried https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode plugin?

ehudla2• 8 years ago

The following lines from my makefile illustrate two tricks I enjoy.

%.pdf: %.text

pandoc -F pandoc-zotxt -F pandoc-citeproc $< -o $@

%.draft.pdf: %.text

pandoc -F pandoc-zotxt -F pandoc-citeproc --template=draft $< -o $@

(1) Automatically grabbing citation details from Zotero. (2) Using the extension of the requested output file to choose the appropriate template.

Not emacs specific, of course.

Emacs for Writers (2015) [video]

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