As most of you know by now, I have a fascination with how non-technical people use Emacs. I’m particularly interested in how writers use it. Certainly there are some world class writers who use (or used) Emacs: Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge spring to mind but there are doubtless many others.
A fundamental problem for writers is coming up with ideas. One technique for dealing with this is called “free writing”. The idea is that you simply write whatever comes into your mind as fast as you can without worrying about editing or even correcting typos.
There are some problems. As Chris Maiorana explains, there’s a strong urge to fix things as you write. That’s not too bad when you write in long hand but when you’re typing on a computer, as most writers these days do, there can be an overpowering urge to hit the BackSpace key if only to fix a typo.
Maiorana has a solution. At least for Emacs users. It’s a simple mode that natters at the user whenever the BackSpace key is used. As Maiorana says, there’s plenty of room for improvement. After all, there are ways of deleting characters other than BackSpace but those are all details and, really, mostly you’re going to use BackSpace in those circumstances.
If you’re writing, or trying to write, fiction, you may want to try the free writing technique and if you do, you might want to use Maiorana’s mode to keep you honest.