Bhalla Kunal over at expLog has an interesting post on his writing setup. It’s Emacs and Org-mode based but, interestingly, he says that the thing that helped his workflow the most was rotating his monitor so that he had more lines on the screen. That means, of course, that he doesn’t have as much horizontal real estate but Kunal likes to keep his lines at 80 characters or less so it works out well for him.
He does, of course, use Olivetti but that’s not too surprising. Mostly he configures Emacs and Org-mode the way you’d expect someone would for a writing environment but he does have a few customizations worth mentioning.
He’s very dedicated to keeping his lines less than 80 characters so he didn’t like the indentation for subheadings in Org-mode. He modified that by setting the indentation to a single space. That helped him keep each line on the screen. Likewise, he inhibited the indentation of the text under each headline for the same reason. He’s also set the text to be in variable pitch font. This is a popular tweak but I’ve never been a fan. I tend to think in “markup” so ASCII input text seems natural to me.
His final tweak is to enable org-hide-emphasis-markers. That means that Org will hide the markup used for bold, Italics, underline, and so on. This is exactly the sort of change that would drive me crazy but I understand how some might prefer it. I probably don’t like it for the same reason I prefer ASCII text for input.
You can get all the details in Kunal’s post so head on over there if you’d like to try some or all of his workflow.