Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another episode of his Emacs podcast, EmacsCast. This time he presents part one of a two-part series on writing in Emacs and Org mode. My first thought as I started to listen to the podcast was, “Mwa Ha Ha, he’s now been totally assimilated into the Emacs Borg.” I don’t know if that’s really true or not but in the first episodes he made a point of saying that he wasn’t looking to switch editors, he just wanted to experiment with Emacs and see what all the excitement is about. Since then, he starting using Emacs and Org mode to produce his blog(s) and was doing more and more of his work in Emacs.
This podcast documents his continuing journey down that road. The current episode concentrates on using Emacs for writing. Davletkaliyev says that he now does all his writing in Emacs and Org mode and he spends most of the podcast—after his usual recap of recent configuration changes—discussing how Org mode makes writing easier and is really the best tool he’s found for writing projects.
He begins by noting that Org mode matches his default writing method. He likes to start with an outline—maybe as simple as a list of chapters, perhaps more detailed—and then “fill in the blanks.” He describes the outline as a skeleton and adding the actual content as putting meat on the skeleton.
One common use case in writing is having the text open in two different windows. For example, a complicated novel may have several niche characters and it’s helpful to have a list of their names and other information about them available while writing the story. Or you may want to keep your outline open in one window while working on a particular chapter or scene in another window. That’s basically the setup that Jay Dixit uses. In either case, Emacs’ indirect buffers are exactly what you need. Davletkaliyev talks about that in some detail.
Finally, when the writing’s done you’ll probably want to export to some other format such as PDF, HTML, or docx/ODT. Org mode makes that easy, either directly or through its interface to Pandoc. Davletkaliyev talks about a book he’s writing that he exports to several formats. He has things set up so that when he saves the source document, all the other formats are generated automatically.
He promises to discuss more use cases in part 2 of the podcast. The podcast is just short of 26 minutes and definitely worth listening to when you have a half hour to spare.