Last week, I wrote about Theena Kumaragurunathan’s post on writing Science Fiction with Emacs and how Emacs was the inspiration for the brain computer interface in his latest SF novel. In a followup post, Kumaragurunathan discusses the philosophical and design choices that make Emacs such a great tool for writers like him. He says,
Good UX comes from good design. The former is the harvest that comes
about from sowing in the latter.
He describes the manifestation of that principal in Emacs as,
Emacs feels timeless to me because it made a simple, stubborn choice
early on: let the user shape the tool.
He goes on to describe this as “giving the user agency” and explains how he’s exploited that agency to integrate Emacs with other tools, such as Org-roam and Hyperbole, to build himself a writing environment tailored specifically for him.
As well as being a novelist, Kumaragurunathan is also a screenwriter so he relies on two distinct Emacs modes for his writing:
- LaTeX for his manuscripts
- Fountain for his screenplays
There is, he says, no other writing environment that can support both long-form writing and screenwriting.
It’s a nice article and well worth spending a few minutes on. His discussion of how Emacs meets his writing needs and the writing environment he’s evolved from it is instructive and entertaining.