Recently, James Gill tweeted about a collection of Emacs resources for writers that he’s curated into a GitHub repository. There are two parts to the collection:
- Tips and examples for writing with Emacs, and
- Writing a book with Emacs.
As you’d expect, most of the articles are about leveraging Org-mode for writing. That’s no surprise, of course, because Org excels at that. Indeed, almost any type of writing from memos or blog posts—such as Irreal’s—to journal articles or books is easily accomplished with Org. I’ve reached the point were virtually everything I write is done with Org-mode.
Sadly, the literary writing market runs on Word so if that’s your niche, you’re going to have to deal with conversion. Org, of course, has built in tools for that and if those don’t meet your needs, the excellent Pandoc almost certainly will.
If you’re a writer who’d like to escape from the pain that is Word and give Emacs a try, be sure to read the articles in Gill’s list. I’ve discussed several of them in Irreal previously but a few are new to me. A handful of the resources are videos but most are short blog posts or articles that are easy and quick to read.
It’s not always obvious how to use Emacs for writing effectively so the articles and videos collected by Gill, which distill a lot of hard won wisdom, can be a real help.