As many of you know, I’m very interested in the use of Emacs for non-technical purposes. In particular, I interested in how prose writers and researchers in disciplines other than Computer Science and its close siblings use Emacs for their writing.
Peter Prevos has written a lot about using Emacs for writing and he’s gathered these posts together into an Emacs Writing Studio section on his blog. As Prevos puts it, “The Emacs Writing Studio configuration shows how to use Emacs to conduct research, write your prose and publish your text as an article, (e)book, or website.”
It’s an excellent resource conveniently broken into small easy-to-read articles. There are 28 articles—although some of them are only peripherally about writing. The other aspect of the Emacs Writing Studio is that it includes a downloadable configuration to get the n00b started using Emacs for writing.
In the reddit article about the Emacs Writing Studio, Alphapapa provides a link to his own collection of articles on using Emacs for writing that’s also worth taking a look at.
In his first article, Prevos notes that the right way to approach Emacs is to learn just enough to get started and then learn other details as they become necessary. As even moderately experienced Emacs users know, it’s a fool’s errand to try to learn everything about Emacs up front. Prevos suggests the same incremental approach that Irreal and others have recommended for Org mode.
If your principal activity is writing prose, you should take a look at Prevos’ site. It is, as I say, a nice resource.
UPDATE : Alphapappa → Alphapapa.