Regular readers know that I’m fascinated with how non-coders use Emacs and especially how (prose) writers leverage it to remove friction from the writing process. Phil Daniels over at The Copytist is a professional writer who’s working on a longish book of about 400 pages.
His writing environment was centered on Microsoft Windows running Google Docs. It had, apparently, been working well for shorter projects but Google Docs just couldn’t handle the larger manuscript. Daniels mentions, in particular, the difficulty of moving chapters around.
With the deadline looming, he decided to try something new and after watching Jay Dixit’s video on using Emacs for writing he installed Emacs, pasted his manuscript into an Org file and got to work. He discovered, as many have, that Emacs and Windows have a troubled relationship so he installed Debian, added the necessary packages, and had what he considers the perfect writing environment.
Two things struck me about his post. First, although I have written at length about the dangers of committing any writing that you care about to Google Docs, I’ve never used it so I was surprised that despite it popularity it doesn’t perform very well. I’ll be adding that to my list of reasons to avoid it.
Second, although Daniels is delighted with how efficient Emacs makes his writing, he hardly uses any of its features. Doubtless that will change as he becomes more experienced with Emacs and discovers new chores that Emacs can help him with but it’s amazing at how much he can get done using just a few basic Emacs navigation commands and a couple of the Org-mode structure editing functions.
If you’re interested in a writing environment, take a look at Daniels post. It’s short and it describes an environment that few would consider complete but it points the way.