Charles Choi has another great post; this time it’s on Tuning Emacs to Write Prose in Org and Markdown. The post is about how he configures Emacs for writing prose. I agree with roughly half his suggestions but this is a matter of taste and neither his nor my preferences are correct. They’re merely preferences and you should choose whatever works best for you.
His first suggestion is to use proportional fonts for prose. It’s easier, he says, to read and makes writing less distracting. I write all my posts and other prose in fixed width fonts but I’m willing to be convinced. It’s easy to add a binding to toggle a buffer between fixed and proportional fonts and I’ve done that so I can try writing with proportional fonts. You need merely toggle variable-pitch-mode to try this out for yourself. If you don’t like it, just toggle it back. If you become a convert add a hook as Choi recommends. I’m writing this post with variable-pitch-mode toggled on to see how I like it.
His second suggestion is to hide markup (things like surrounding text with stars to make it bold). I disagree with this. To me it seems to hide information. Of course I’ve been using one markup or another for over a quarter of a century so perhaps I’m just used to seeing it. Regardless, Emacs let’s you have it either way.
His next suggestion is to use flyspell, which I completely agree with. I was a bit confused by his suggestion to use company-mode to suggest alternate spellings. That’s built in for me and bound to Ctrl+;. Perhaps that’s because I use aspell rather than osx-dictionary.
Next he suggests using dabbrev-expand to complete the current word based on previous words in the buffer. I do this too but use hippie-expand, which basically tries to complete the word in all possible ways.
Choi suggests leveraging the menu system for various operations. I strongly disagree with this. One of my goals is to eliminate mouse actions completely. That’s easy in Emacs but recently I’ve been experimenting with ways to eliminate its use in the rest of my macOS interactions. I’ll write more about that later.
Finally, Choi suggest using visual-line-mode and some sort of word counting facility. I started using visual-line-mode to avoid hard line wraps in WordPress but like it and have started using it for all my (prose) writing. For line counting, I use the excellent wc-mode to give me a running count of words.
Choi also strongly suggests using Avy. Long time Irreal readers know that I’m completely on board with that.
This is a good post with lots of good ideas. You may agree or disagree with a particular suggestion but Choi is upfront with admitting these are his preferences and yours my differ. If you use Emacs for writing things other than code, you’ll want to check out this post.