Fedora Magazine has an interesting article in which a journalist, odisej, discovers using Emacs as his writing tool. His article is a sort of perfect case study because odisej has no real technical background so his take on using Emacs for writing is that of someone without expertise in text editors. Of course, he does have experience with “word processors” and has tried a lot of them. He even tried using ancient ones such as WordStar and Word Perfect but none of them clicked for him. Then he tried Emacs and finally discovered his ideal writing environment.
Of course, Emacs is famously idiosyncratic, having existed long before IBM decided what the one true user interface should look like. This means that Emacs is infamous for its steep learning curve and odisej certainly suffered from it but once he learned the basics he knew he had found the perfect writing tool.
What makes it so perfect? He doesn’t say so explicitly but as usual it’s Emacs’ configuration and extensibility that makes the difference. For example, odisej likes wider margins than the default and Emacs makes it easy to set them to his preferred value. Of course, most editors can do that but Emacs makes just about everything configurable.
Then there’s extensibility. Emacs has thousands of packages available that can provide practically any capability the user desires. Odisej added flyspell and wc-mode to his configuration to take care of spelling correction and word counting. Again, most editors provide some flavor of these functions but Emacs has several packages to do them that differ slightly in how they work and how they present their results to the user. As always, Emacs lets you have it your way.
If you want to view Emacs from a writer’s point of view, take a look at odisej’s post.