Greg Newman has another episode of Emacs Carnival going this month. This time it’s about using Emacs for writing. That’s a subject I’m very interested in so I’ve been looking forward to this episode’s contributions. The first is from Erik L. Arneson who writes about how he uses Org mode for all his writing.
Arneson says he’s written about 500,000 words with Org mode. Before Org he wrote mostly in LaTeX or plain text. Now, he writes exclusively in Org. His story is a lot like mine, A quick check with grep and wc tells me that I’ve written about 2 millions words with Org. Before that I mostly wrote with Troff so I’ve been using one markup language or another for a long time.
The important thing, as Arneson says, is that I don’t have to use Word or any of its evil siblings for my writing. That matters to me because Org generally doesn’t have an opinion unlike most “word processors” that think they know better than I do what I want to write and feel free to change my text accordingly without asking.
As Arneson notes, writing in Org mode is tremendously flexible. He—and I—use it for blog posts, reports, spreadsheets for keeping track of household expenses, letters, emails, texts, and even books. When you add in Emacs Everywhere, virtually everything I write is in Emacs.
As I’ve said before, I can no longer write comfortably in anything else. All the other apps that deal with text seem like Bizarro World where nothing works as you expect it to. What Emacs user hasn’t experienced the frustration of trying to use Emacs bindings in other applications? See what I mean about Bizarro World?