> 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.