HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

My favourite talk on this topic is "Emacs for writers": https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU

If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.

> That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users.

Color me surprised! I'm turning into a stereotypical Linux greybeard but I must be true to my nature, and endorse Linux for writers.

There's this famous story, about the secretaries who mastered Emacs and preferred it to the other 'easier' administrative programs they were offered.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K....

"Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it."

"People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them."

Hell, there's even a 1-hour series on YouTube called "Emacs for Writers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

Spoiler: I skimmed it and it's as I thought - it's largely about Emacs and org-mode. Honestly, I can't argue with the classics. Here's my pitch.

Writers of the world: You are information workers. That means you have problems with the organization of information, probably, and - related - information overload.

Let Emacs help you with this!

It has a mode, org-mode, which is usually overcomplicated, but is basically as simple as markdown (no, really). Has anyone ever walked away from Markdown because it was too difficult to understand? Probably not. It doesn't have to be any harder with org-mode. In fact, in the next two lines, I'll teach you about 95% of how I use it - everything, in two lines.

* an asterisk before a line makes it like a sublayer of the layer/line above it; if you're on a sublayer, add another asterisk to make a sublayer of a sublayer, and so on ad infinitum...

* press tab to expand a layer or a sublayer you are on; press tab again to contract or hide it

That's it! That's 95% of the value of org-mode right there. It's the simplest way to organize information, in my experience.

Now, there are other advantages too, like: Emacs works with plain text, and plain text is super portable (everything can read plain text), fast to load, and can even be a convenient method of organizing things, if you give your files descriptive names and learn to use 'ls' to list things. Because those files are plain text, they take up almost no space, so it's fine if your computer has a zillion of them, it'll be blazing fast.

I could go on, but these two things alone make Emacs worth your time, and there's plenty of other advantages, like using LaTeX to make PDF's, you can 'grow into' also.

⬐ michaericalribo

I think you've misunderstood why someone would prefer Scrivener or a word processor: a rich-text ecosystem that "just works", in terms of WYSIWG / rich text editing; being the de facto standard for many non-technical user; and being more than "as simple as Markdown", but actively providing a tight ecosystem focused on writing.

Is it possible to recreate some of this functionality in emacs? Definitely. But, it requires a lot of patience, exploration, and determination.

Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file?

You've received a .docx draft from a friend, or copy for your book blurb, or a press release for your upcoming publication. How do you edit that .docx and return it in better shape than you found it?

You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of. How do you quickly navigate between these multiple sources of content, marking things up, merging different aspects of documents?

I'm a die-hard emacser, and I do a lot of personal and academic writing in LaTeX. But honestly, have you ever had to reformat a LaTeX manuscript for journal publication? It can take hours just to get the damn file to compile.

emacs is worth the time, if you're inclined to tinker and invest the effort to get it to work—but for me, at least, that's a hobby. It's disingenuous to present it as a real competitor to industry-standard workhorse word processors. And most writers with a day job can barely find time to write, "investing time in emacs" is a nonstarter for getting things done! In fact, I tune my own org-basaed PIM system as a way to avoid getting real work done...

⬐ dleslie

> Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file?

https://orgmode.org/manual/Comment-Lines.html

> You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/Internal-Links.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/Handling-Links.html

⬐ michaericalribo

To be clear, by "your editor", I don't mean emacs—I mean the person who works at a publisher: she knows that a gnu is just a wildebeest and inheritance bequeathal of wealth; assumes "C-c ;" is just an obscure emoji; and will not waste her time indulging a writer who uses an obscure [1], roundabout way of entering text into M$ Word.

Look, again, you're preaching to the choir—I use emacs every day. But writing a Python script to generate my org-native ToC to navigate reference materials is just...a very different, more work-intensive beast than an interactive drag-and-drop IDE tailored to the needs of professional writers. Impossible to approximate, with enough determination? No. Possible to start using intuitively within the first 15 minutes? Also: no.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

⬐ dleslie

I understood what you meant.

"Open my doc in notepad or any other text editor. Put comments wherever you want; if you'd be so kind as to put them on their own line with a # at the start it would save me some time."

Easy peasy.

The beauty of org is that it's just a text file. You don't need Emacs to edit it.

⬐ mattl

And then you have line endings and weird control characters and emoji don’t work in Emacs, etc etc

I too have used Emacs a lot. I’m getting off the boat.

⬐ dleslie

UTF Emojis work in Emacs, and control characters are displayed and easily removed.

If you're git-savvy it's even easier to merge the comments in by using Magit and reviewing the changes individually.

This talk called "Emacs for writers" is amazing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

>The idea of somebody critiquing Latex for being a difficult format to write in while writing almost exclusively plaintext is pretty baffling to me

Creative writers for instance don't really care about typesetting; they want to keep their manuscript organized and to be able to change it easily. Here's en example[1] of a writer showing his personal workflow for writing (in this case using emacs) and you'll see what I mean

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

⬐ JoshMnem

That video helped me get Org Mode working in a usable way. It's worth spending a weekend on setting it up, especially capture templates.

⬐ ehudla

The following lines from my makefile illustrate two tricks I enjoy.

%.pdf: %.text

pandoc -F pandoc-zotxt -F pandoc-citeproc $< -o $@

%.draft.pdf: %.text

pandoc -F pandoc-zotxt -F pandoc-citeproc --template=draft $< -o $@

(1) Automatically grabbing citation details from Zotero. (2) Using the extension of the requested output file to choose the appropriate template.

Not emacs specific, of course.

⬐ ehudla

His emacs customization apparently: https://github.com/incandescentman/Emacs-Settings

⬐ krylon

I once tried to write a novel, and I used emacs, too. It was fun, at least the emacs part, but I was already a loyal emacs user at that point.

IMHO, Emacs is a very good text editor, and that is what writing is all about, is it not?

⬐ chipotle_coyote

It is, but unless you're doing it all on your own, writing a novel is also about working with editors and typesetters. (Or formatters, or whatever you want to call the typesetter equivalent for an ebook.) In my experience, at least in the fiction world, these folks are going to expect you to be using Microsoft Word, and you'd better have a tool that can generate Word-compatible files formatted to the industry standard -- and that supports Word-compatible comments and revision tracking well enough to "round trip" documents transparently.

I'm a big fan of open data formats and plain text markup, and I write a lot of fiction in Markdown. I love this notion in principle. But I suspect it's a lot easier to put into practice when everyone involved in your book's production is down with your toolchain -- which may mean everyone involved in your book's production is you.

(For the record, I convert the Markdown to rich text and do final formatting in Apple Pages for manuscripts that I'm submitting somewhere else. For novella-on-up length work, though, I'm one of those annoying Scrivener converts.)

⬐ krylon

I did not get to the point where I would have contacted a publishing house. I was just writing it for myself, mostly, so I had no restrictions/requirements imposed wrt file format. I used LaTeX and generated PDF from that.

⬐ chipotle_coyote

So everyone was down with your toolchain. :) I've also done the LaTeX->PDF thing for several books for my publisher, but that was after everything got finalized in Word.

⬐ gkya

Org does export to ODT (not loaded by default), but the output reqquires tweaking.

⬐ nextos

With Pandoc you can convert from many formats to many other formats, including DOCX and PPTX.

Nothing prevents you from using Emacs, or Vi(m), write in Markdown, Org or whatever and deliver a DOCX.

The amazing thing is that you can even work with people that use Word track changes, while staying in Emacs, Vi(m) or any other text editor and using Pandoc.

⬐ kmonad

really? i did not know that. that's cool. are there resources I can look at how this would work with comments/edits tracked by collaborators?

⬐ chipotle_coyote

Pandoc can be given instructions on what to do with changes and comments on a per-document basis, but not a per-change and per-comment basis. It does mark the changes/comments in the output file, though, so they could be processed in other ways. Personally, it's not really useful for my workflow, but it might work for some others.

⬐ bitwize

Suck it up and use Word. Your editor is going to want to back-and-forth that manuscript with you, adding annotations as necessary, and it's much easier to just do it all within Word than to import/export to some other tool that cannot guarantee 100% compatibility.

When it comes to producing text for humans to read, there's a tool that virtually everybody uses and that's Word. You will simplify your life considerably by using it, too.

⬐ nextos

There's no reason why my editor would see I'm using Pandoc in a back and forth exchange if we use a decent DOCX template. Furthermore, DOCX is an open format, and I don't have the luxury of a Windows or Mac machine plus an Office license.

In fact, all documents I typeset with Pandoc -> DOCX look like really carefully typeset documents on Word because the style is so consistent and in line with what latest versions of Word encourage: separation of content and presentation.

⬐ emgee_1

You probably want then to exchange both the .org file and .docx file and let them make changes to the .org file. They will quickly see how the docx file looks very much the same to the .org file Then you can diff the modified .org file with the original. Using git you incorporatecthe changes

⬐ nextos

That's the ideal situation, but I'm often interacting with people that have trouble using Word, let alone Git! They don't even know what a VCS is.

⬐ krylon

I am all for pragmatism, and if I was to try to publish a novel, I would probably use .docx.

But if you discover a good text editor, be it Emacs or Vi or something else, it changes the way you edit text. There are things that a good text editor does exceedingly well that are painfully hard - if even possible at all! - in a program like Word. Some of these are specific to programming, but some are specific to editing text -- Which kind of is what writers do, isn't it? ;-) -- and once you crossed that barrier, going back to Word - useful as it may be - is like going back to chiseling your writing into slabs of rock.

⬐ chipotle_coyote

Pandoc is an amazing tool! I've used it to convert both Markdown and DOCX files to TeX for typesetting.

But, using a plain text editor and Pandoc for conversion is a lot like using Scrivener and "compiling" to DOCX: it's a one-way process. If your editor gets back to you with a marked-up Word file, you're going to need to address those comments/revisions in Word. (Or Pages or LibreOffice or something else that can round-trip those.) And from that point on, keeping your original "source document" and the Word document in sync becomes a bit of a juggling act.

⬐ w0m

I love vim but i want orgmod (or equiv..) badly. :(

I should bite the bullet and learn EVIL...

⬐ Elidrake24

Spacemacs makes the transition nearly painless, I'd highly suggest it.

⬐ marbu

Have you tried https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode plugin?

⬐ molloy

There's really not much to learn!

⬐ mitchty

I switched from vi/vim to emacs just for org mode. Took about a year but now I can't see going back. Its not that bad, and org mode is definitely worth it.

⬐ smashd

I made the jump from Vim to Emacs about 6 months ago and org-mode was a major reason. It is very much worth it IMO. Evil supports all the Vim commands I was used to, and org-mode has been a revelation. It gave me that one place to put all my tasks, meeting notes, brainstorms, etc, and with useful workflows for keeping it cohesive. It took me an afternoon to get Emacs set up as my daily driver. It took longer (weeks/months) to dial in my org-mode workflow and knowledge to a point where I was satisfied with it, but org-mode was still a net improvement from day one. I continue to discover cool features in Emacs and org-mode on a regular basis. Don't wait, try it!

⬐ melling

I have several Emacs for Writers links in my GitHub notes:

https://github.com/melling/EditorNotes/blob/master/emacs.org

I saw this a couple of weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

I really like how he has no idea how to pronounce stuff, but he still managed to bend emacs after his will.

⬐ Normal_gaussian

This is great, and hilarious. A good place to get an idea of the video from is about 13 minutes in until 15 minutes.

⬐ Johnny_Brahms

And actually quite inspiring. He got me to set up abbrev mode properly and actually start using emacs for _everything_ text related (even this comment, using "it's all text" for firefox).

I set up it's all text with a bunch of different file endings depending on what language I use, so that abbrev mode works correctly. It's a godsend.

I'm not sure if I would define it as a "talk" (and the details are more meaningful if you know how to use Emacs), but Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs for writing instead of programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU