Irreal

Marco Ieni was tired of working with Microsoft Word so he he built a workflow that uses Org mode for document preparation. Irreal readers know he won’t be getting any arguments here. Even putting aside the brain-dead Word UI there are compelling reasons to prefer plain text: you can use effective version control; write with any editor; make use of grep, diff, and similar utilities; and even generate some text programmatically. And, of course, your data is not held captive in some proprietary format.

There’s nothing new about any of that, of course, but Ieni took it a step further and considered the problem of collaborators. He accepts that convincing colleagues to adopt Emacs is basically impossible so he came up with a command line utility, doc-org, to enable non-Emacsers to have a sensible writing environment. Of course, they still have use some sort text editor, which many academics would no doubt consider an intolerable burden but Ieni says that the system is mainly aimed at people who are already using LaTeX and would like to move to the easier Org markup. It’s a good fit for people like that. As Ieni puts it, “The main goal of doc-org is to bring the conciseness of org mode to latex users.”

Ieni concludes his post by saying that he hopes that people will come to realize that “the best way to write documents together is the same of writing code together: plain text + version control systems like git.” Realistically that’s probably not going to happen but the most efficient and successful will probably adopt some sort of notion similar to this.

Derek Taylor has an interesting take on learning Doom Emacs. Most immigrants to Doom are coming from Vim or are Emacs users who need the more ergonomic evil keybindings because of RSI problems. But, says Taylor, some people coming to Doom are total n00bs arriving from outside of either Vim or Emacs. He’s done several videos on switching to Doom but some of his viewers told him he was neglecting users coming to Doom tabula rasa.

He’s posted a video to remedy this. It’s intended to be an introduction to Doom Emacs for the n00b. He doesn’t assume the viewer has any particular background. He shows how to get Doom installed and do some elementary configuration. I think his video is perfect for beginners because he’s not an Emacs power user and is well positioned to understand the neophytes’ concerns and problems.

If you’re new to the Emacs/Vim world and would like to try out Doom, take a look at Taylor’s video; It gives you enough to get started. I still like the idea of starting with vanilla Emacs and building a configuration that’s customized explicitly to suit you but I recognize that some folks are in a hurry an would rather have a reasonably usable configuration out of the box. And, of course, Doom allows you to control which packages and features get loaded so it can still be tweaked to suit the individual user.

Mike Zamansky has added another video to his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about bufler, a replacement for ibuffer. Mostly when I call up ibuffer, I just want to see a list of my buffers and I don’t care that much about grouping. Somewhere along the line, I installed ibuffer-vc that groups the buffers by their vc root but I don’t really care about the grouping. I should probably uninstall ibuffer-vc but I don’t mind the grouping and it’s there so inertia has ruled.

Zamansky is different. He really likes having his buffers grouped by project. After his last video, someone suggested he try bufler. He did that and liked the results except that it split the current window and opened the results in the new window when it was called. He didn’t like that and couldn’t find a way to change the behavior so he wrote a bit of Elisp to give him his preferred behavior.

The video is just over 10 minutes so it will be easy to find time for it. If, like me, you just want a list of buffers, bufler may not interest you. If you’d like to have a more organized listing, bufler may be for you. Either way, take a look a Zamansky’s video and see what you think.

When writers ask for software suggestions, one of the most frequent recommendations I see—other than the evil whose name must not be uttered—is Scrivener. The idea is that you can write in any order you like and keep project notes with the rest of your work. Of course, Scrivener is proprietary software and probably keeps your data in some sort of proprietary format (I’m not sure about this) so it should make any wary writer nervous. All your data is local and old versions continue to work so it’s not as bad as a lot of other commercial software.

Still, if you’re paranoid or just like supporting open source and having your text data in text, you’ll probably prefer Emacs, Vim, or some other text editor. There are a lot of such solutions including, of course, Org mode. On the other hand, people who have used Scrivener really like the way it organizes their writing projects and even if they move on they say they miss that aspect of it.

If you’re one of those people, help is at hand. William Rankin has announced that he’s just released version 0.4.1 of Binder and that it’s available in MELPA and MELPA-stable. Binder is an Emacs minor mode for handling multi-file writing projects. Rankin says that it’s heavily influenced by Scrivener and therefore may be just the thing for folks wanting to write in, say, Markdown or Org while still enjoying a Scrivener-like experience.

I haven’t tried it yet—although I intend to—and it’s still fairly early in the development cycle but it seems like a great addition to the Emacs arsenal for writers. If you’re involved with (largish) writing projects, you might want to give it a try.