A Clean Writing Environment

Dhavan Vaidya has an interesting post on a clean writing environment. It’s his idea of the ideal writing milieu. What strikes me about his post is that his idea of the best writing setup is completely different from mine. About the only thing we agree on is that it’s Emacs based.

For example, Vaidya is very concerned about what his text looks like while’s he writing it. I care very much what the final product looks like but have no real interest in what it looks like while I’m writing it. I’m happy with plain, monospaced text and don’t bother hiding the Org markup. I don’t worry about fonts or any other WYSIWYG features. That’s probably because before I used Org mode, I wrote everything using troff and got used to writing in a monospaced font and mixing in markup. As Andrew Tannenbaum said about why he used Troff,

I don’t have any need to see what the output will look like. I am quite convinced that troff will follow my instructions dutifully.

The disparity in Vaidya’s and my preferred work flows is actually good because it shows, once again, how flexible Emacs is. No matter what writing environment you prefer, Emacs is able to give it to you. Neither his nor mine is better; they’re just what we, as individuals, prefer. The important thing is that Emacs lets us have it.

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