John Borwick was looking for a writing environment that suited him. He’d tried Scrivener and some of the other tools but they didn’t work for him. Then he saw Jay Dixit’s video that I wrote about back in 2015 and decided to adapt Dixit’s solution.
Borwick has an interesting post that describes his system for writing in Emacs. The heart of the system is the use of org-panes to provide three panes: a top-level outline of his document, a detailed outline, and the main pane for the actual writing. He also uses Olivetti, which many writers favor because it increases the margin sizes. He uses a few other convenience packages but the environment centers around the three views of the piece he’s writing.
His solution is, in a sense, the polar opposite of the blank page environment preferred by many writers. In that setup, there is nothing but an empty space that you can put words into. In the extreme case, even the mode line is eliminated. Bastien Guerry wrote a post about how to do this with Emacs. The nice thing is that Emacs can provide either environment—and many others, as well—so you’re covered whatever your preferences.
I do all my writing in Emacs—mostly in Org-mode—and wouldn’t consider using any other tool. It’s easy to adapt it to provide just what I want and if some other tool has a nice feature, it’s usually easy to add it to Emacs.