Protesilaos Stavrou's recent videos about mixed fonts in Org Mode and tools for focused editing really help with making a comfy writing space: Proportionally spaced fonts and monospace where you decide is necessary - this was specially nice, but there's more over there as well. Prot's channel is my go-to for Emacs extensibility content
In default emacs with no plugins you can select the entire document with C-x h and use M-= to get a word count. Also if you didn't know that M-= existed (or version < 24.1) you can always select the document (C-x h) and pipe it into a shell command with M-| wc
I used to be on windows since 95 barely dipped into linux throughout the years. thx to you and others i am now running a btrfs on luks arch, and now im taking the plunge to develop my workflow from the ground up for my entire WM and dev environment with xmonad and doom/neovim! very excited to dive in and appreciate the great content!
I do most of my writing in vim. Not just prose, but notes, beats, meta things, all that jazz. This video makes me want to take org-mode for a spin! I think it'd be really neat! Thanks for the impetus to try this out.
Strongly agree: Emacs is also perfect for editing plain text books and articles. By combining regular expressions and keyboard macros, it is possible to achieve astonishing levels of productivity, and to do in a few minutes what would take hours (and even days) for the non-initiated
I edit books with LaTeX, and my main tool has been GNU Emacs with AUCTeX, and I've never looked back. I only use Texmaker to correct LaTeX code here and there, but to actually create documents, I only use GNU Emacs. I have never regretted it. I haven't used Org Mode yet, and look forward to using it for other tasks.
I'm a writer and Microsoft Word is required in my industry. Editors and publishers rely on track changes and the collaborative features in OneDrive. Unfortunately there's no way around it for now. I'd use Vim if I could.
@@hexa3389 TexMacs is less code oriented and more visual. It's more practical for things like tables, where the code is just messy and easy to screw up. If you're not writing LaTeX docs all the time, it's a hassle having to web search on how to create a table, or how to finely control an image, etc. In fact, I'd rather use Org Mode to build tables. AucTex is nice that it has menus for when you forget about a command, but it's a complete mess in that it sorts the commands alphabetically, and not by function. Even gnome-latex does a much better job at that. TeXstudio is a bit better still, with a preview pane and wizards to get a quick skeleton for tables, images, or even blank documents.
Great video. I do all my writing with Emacs - articles, websites and books. Org Mode is the best LaTeX editor ever. The Hugo website editor natively understands Org Mode.
I used Emacs for a while, and it's a very useful and configurable writing tool (especially ORG mode). However, what I found was it is a steep learning curve, and unless you're prepared to dedicate all of your writing to emacs, your going to struggle to remember all of the keyboard shortcuts. There are extensions you can add to emacs to update the shortcuts to "modern standards" but this comes with it's own problems as well.
I don't know why are you worrying about keybinds, emacs have basic keybinds like arrow keys, mouse support like other text editors just use them till you are familiar with emacs keybinds. Anything is better than writing in leafpad/notepad.
How well do chord style writing methods work in those modes? I wonder if it would be too painful to setup a vim setup that can detect when you switch automatically?
I'm not even close to a professional writer but the main reason cause I switch to vim was to use latex, atom and texstudio were kinda big and slow (atom mainly) . Vim with vimtex and some snippets works pretty good, I didn't try latex with coc yet, I think is possible.
@DistroTube I think flyspell is asynchronous, it shouldn't slow down emacs (the error markers just might take a while to appear). I have it disabled by default, because of the visual clutter. A lot of words will be flagged because they were written abbreviated or because its jargon and there are other more important tools that give you error markers for correctness of the code.
I can't not use Emacs for writing at this point. Of course, org-mode is one reason, but another is that I think a modal text editor like Vim isn't very practical if you write in Japanese or Chinese or any language that requires something like ibus or fctix, because every time you change to normal mode, you have to go back to English, and that's annoying. Of course, there are ways around this. You could bind everything to keyboard shortcuts and then have a way to toggle those modifiers on and off without holding them (I can do this on my keyboard firmware itself, but you can do it elsewhere), and that would do basically the same thing. Still, the way that Vim does it doesn't work for me, so I use Emacs, and will continue to do so until I eventually write my own editor from scratch.
how do you style everything in Emacs? I mean I remember when I was in the university, the require me for papers with certain formats like margin, page numbers, font sizes, font families, and so on. I won't be studying at the university anytime soon again, but when I return I want to ditch word processors (especially MS Word) to write my homeworks and thesis with Doom Emacs :) [I just love that program with its vim keys]. By the way I'm learning web development, is it any hint to do all that with html and Css? 😃
I realize overthinking things is really bad. Loving Arch. Feeling conflicted about systemd. But don't want to leave Arch. Loving nvim. Feeling tempted about this org-mode stuff in Emacs. Still prefer the terminal and don't want to leave nvim. Argh! 😀
I'd love to use org-mode more but it is difficult within a tex environment (yes I know I can export, but this frequently never works properly without serious farting about). What I REALLY would love is a native latex folding mode which doesn't involve auctex (I want to write -- not frick around with configs for hours).
If you have never used emacs keybindings or even vim with the evil layer. Try out ergoemacs. THE best way (IMHO) to use emacs and have access to these awesome writing tools. It brings emacs into the 21 century. Alt+i,j,k or l to move the cursor, Ctrl+o opens, Ctrl+s saves. It has smart cut and smart copy so as to not conflict with the normal emacs keybindings. It is very well made, intuitive and powerful.
a native compiled emacs (gcc emacs) makes emacs faster when you are working on long documents. Atleast that has been my experience, and I use emacs for a lot of academic writing. I output to .docx eventually for a Grammarly check, and sharing with coauthors.
Could you do a video on installing these tools? I think I got it but some may benefit from a video like that. I found one last night but the guy had a thick Indian accent and did things way too fast.
Hmm, how you uh, ... how you coming on that novel, ... you're working on? Huh? Got a big uh, big stack of papers there? Got a-got a-got a nice little-nice little story, you're working on there, big-big-big, uh novel ... you've been working on for three years? Huh? [nup] Got a ... got a compelling protagonist? Huh? Got a ... got a ... obstacle for him to overcome? Huh? ... Little story, brewing there, working on, [nup] working on that for quite some time huh? ... Yeah, talking about that, three years ago, ... Yeah, been working on that the whole time? Nice little uh, narrative. Beginning, middle, and end? Some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends? Yeah? At the end, your uh, main character is uh, richer for the experience? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah, you got uh-No, no, you, you deserve some time off.
