Emacs For Writers
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a favorite talk showing Emacs as a writing environment rather than just a programmer's editor.
What it is
Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2016 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec bjoli · 2021-01 · on “NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels”
My favourite talk on this topic is "Emacs for writers": [this video] If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.
Strong rec bjoli · 2024-06 · on “WordStar – A Writer's Word Processor (1990)”
There is always Emacs. I love this talk by Joe Dixit about how he came from things like scrivener to Emacs [this video]
Recommends cdubose · 2016-01 · on “Ask HN: Best (Tech) talks from 2015”
I'm not sure if I would define it as a "talk" (and the details are more meaningful if you know how to use Emacs), but Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs for writing instead of programming: [this video]
Recommends Johnny_Brahms · 2016-08 · on “How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools”
I saw this a couple of weeks ago: [this video] I really like how he has no idea how to pronounce stuff, but he still managed to bend emacs after his will.
Cites TremendousJudge · 2019-01 · on “The LaTeX fetish (2016)”
>The idea of somebody critiquing Latex for being a difficult format to write in while writing almost exclusively plaintext is pretty baffling to me Creative writers for instance don't really care about typesetting; they want to keep their manuscript organized and to be able to change it easily. Here's en example[1] of a writer showing his personal workflow for writing (in this case using emacs) and you'll see what I mean [1] [this video]
Cites julianeon · 2020-05 · on “Making Emacs Popular Again”
> That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Color me surprised! I'm turning into a stereotypical Linux greybeard but I must be true to my nature, and endorse Linux for writers. There's this famous story, about the secretaries who mastered Emacs and preferred it to the other 'easier' administrative programs they were offered. [LINK] . "Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it." "People st