Ross Baker, channeling the late, great Meatloaf, has a contribution to Greg Newman’s Emacs Carnival on writing with Emacs entitled Writing in Emacs: two out of three ain’t bad. The title comes from the three ways that Baker writes:
- Alone
- With asynchronous collaboration
- With synchronous collaboration
Baker uses Emacs and Org mode for the first two. After all, despite what anyone else might tell you, Org mode is the absolute best way of writing text that you want to do “something else” with later. By “something else” I mean, perhaps, publishing it on the Web, turning it into a PDF, or even exporting it to that spawn of the devil from Microsoft. Even if you’re just writing for yourself with no thought of exporting it, there are a lot of advantages to writing in Org mode.
It’s the third category that gives Baker problems. Lots of people—for reasons I’ve never been able to understand—like to pair program and have two or more people modifying the same piece of text simultaneously. To my mind, that’s the way to madness but plenty of serious people, like Perry Metzger, swear by it.
Regardless, if you do want to pair program it’s pretty much impossible in Emacs. Folks who need it are forced to do the unthinkable and use something like Google Docs. That’s what Baker does. He’s hopeful that Ethersync and its nascent Emacs interface will allow him to avoid the horrors of things like Word and Google Docs.