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Comment by tincholio | Hacker News Reader

95% of what he wants can be done with a suitable Emacs config, org-mode and some elisp... What I find confusing, coming from a professional writer (though maybe that's the eye with which they would look at this), is that he seems to view very different aspects (purely cosmetic ones, such as the indented line in a first paragraph, or heavily usability-oriented ones, inserting a TODO note) as equally important.

Then again, he has tried all of the editors out there, and I'm just an Emacs geek :)

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95% of any program can be done with a suitable emacs config, org-mode and some elisp. And then nobody will use it because it's emacs.

The parent comment reminds me of a recent "every Stackoverflow question" post which I cannot locate right now.

Yeah, you could emacs, or whatever. Or a regular human person could just use this app and really enjoy the User Experience out of the box without any fuss.

I use emacs+org for writing fiction. I usually start pen+paper first, handwrite the first draft, and then rewrite in emacs (I recently started scanning them into pdfs and using that instead of just reading them off the paper, readd helps with bad posture and neck pain in long sessions). Pen and paper is way more portable than the smallest laptop with a good keyboard, way more comfortable to write in than the best tablet, easy on my eyes, and no frills or other distractions. When I digitize it into an org mode file, it also becomes a first redaction of the manuscript, and allows me to catch many more errors than if I composed in emacs in the first place and re-read. I use org-mode comments as editorial notes.

I also like how it doesn't make me think about formatting, layout, pages and whatnot. It's just a single digital papyrus scroll. If I need to store separate notes about the text, than I put the text under its own section, and make another section named notes, and write it there.

Org mode is fantastic, have you tried auto correcting with abbrev mode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhI_riv_6HM

That looks interesting, but I don't think it'll work for me, as I write in multiple languages and my main one (turkish) is agglutinative, so false positives would be many (it's really bad with aspell too, so I don't use it). I do use abbrevs though, I've added this function and mapped it to SPC to make it work seamlessly:

  (defun gk-maybe-expand-abbrev-or-space ()
    (interactive)
    (when (null (expand-abbrev))
      (insert " ")))

I think book-writing software is one of those areas where 'UX' is crucially important, and if that's your ultimate goal then different kinds of features all get evaluated by the same metric, 'does this pass the idiot test, while looking and feeling clean and useful?'. I think most editors miss the mark when it comes to elegance - retaining a large feature-set without 'cramping style' seems hard.

> he seems to view very different aspects (purely cosmetic ones, such as the indented line in a first paragraph, or heavily usability-oriented ones, inserting a TODO note) as equally important.

er.. and why shouldn't they be? I want all the features I want, and they are equally important, unless they are mutually exclusive and I'm forced to choose between one or the other.

In the case you point out, indentation isn't "purely cosmetic" and enhances usability, and in any case, cosmetics and usability aren't mutually exclusive so one can desire both.

Too bad emacs just don't have a good text editor ;)

Sorry to spoil the joke but this problem has been solved. Emacs now has Vim emulation (called Evil mode).

Indeed, you are:)

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