Theena Kumaragurunathan, a filmmaker, photographer, and writer, has an interesting post on using Emacs for writing science fiction. There’s nothing new about that, if course. Several well known SF authors use Emacs. Kumaragurunathan’s post is interesting for two reasons:
- The story of his journey from using a word processor, to a customized Vim/NeoVim editing environment, and finally to a happy Emacs user.
- His use of Emacs as a model for his “Brain Computer Interface”, a central part of his story.
The brain computer interface (BCI) is how the technical elite communicate with a sentient AI 500 years in the future. The BCI is more complicated and featureful than that described in Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty. Instead of dealing with buffers, it deals with thought patterns and, as with Emacs buffers, they can be manipulated in various ways by a programming language built into the BCI.
It’s an interesting concept but for those of us in 2026, the real value of Kumaragurunathan’s post is his journey from word processors to Emacs. The journey is one of a quest to control his writing environment. Many Irreal readers will relate even if they have to substitute “programming environment” for “writing environment”.
Kumaragurunathan is promising a followup post in which he will discuss his Emacs workflow and how he uses it for writing fiction, research notes, film scripts, and even for programming. I’m looking forward to it.