I’m sure you emacsheads will love it.

ihopesolution.com

I’m sure it will develop its own voice, since we both have, um, firmly held opinions about how things should be done. And odd senses of humor.

Since I tend to use emacs more for writing and org-mode rather than sysadminning, I’ll keep my emacs posts for my personal blog. (And so ends my feeble attempt to justify tagging this “emacs” and watching it hit planet emacsen.)

I will use revision control. By an accident of history I will be using git.

I will use a text editor. Since I don’t want to have to run into frictions from modal editing while fiction writing, I will be using Emacs.

If fictions were primarily distributed and displayed as plain-text files, I’d be good to go. They aren’t, and I would like to at least attempt to send this higher up the food chain, ending in either a Microsoft Word Document or PDF.

Say, LaTeX makes some nice pdfs. While it manifestly does not suck, and AucTeX is the bee’s knees, I want to do whatever I can in the way of premature optimization to tilt the ratio of writing to formatting heavily in writing’s favor. LaTeX is formatting heavy, so I’d like to avoid that.

Docbook XML also suffers from the same issue. It is a well-specced and quite nice document format. And while nxml-mode is bar-none the premier way to edit straight XML, sorry, it ain’t happening.

So, what essentially plain-text formats can I convert to either LaTeX or Docbook XML, which I can then use to produce my output format of choice? As of this writing, I see three viable options:

• org-mode
• muse-mode
• markdown and pandoc

org-mode ships with emacs, and is great. Writing novels in it would be orthogonal to its original purpose in note-taking and agenda-organizing. It only exports LaTeX/PDF, not Docbook. While it may work, I think successive options are more promising.

muse-mode is designed from the ground up for publishing, not note-taking. It exports both LaTeX and Docbook. This would probably be my first choice, except for one thing: its wiki syntax.

It seems asinine of me to start complaining about a wiki syntax now. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this exercise, to find a wiki-like syntax I can convert from? Right. I’m not complaining about a wiki syntax, I’m complaining about this wiki syntax. All in all it’s not necessarily a bad one, but it is a domain-specific language for this mode only. It enjoys no reuse outside of this particular application. If the third option didn’t exist, I’d probably use it anyway.

But we have markdown, and the magical frobnicator that frobnicates markdown into a potpourri of other formats: namely, pandoc. Markdown mode is pretty handy, and I’ll probably end up writing a simple minor-mode or git-hook bash script for automating the pandoc conversions.

I’ll let you know how this turns out.

I proceeded to burn the Emacs keybindings into my brain and fingers. I developed some slightly inefficient workflows (copying and pasting from text documents into OpenOffice documents, editing the original text file based on whatever page length I was going for, rinse and repeat until paper is produced) that were, on the whole, a net gain due to the speed of typing without mousing. The linux filesystem positively danced under my fingertips. I had more control over my system than I had ever had on Windows.

I progressed to producing documents and drafts in LaTeX. While it’s a bit arcane, using Emacs with AUCTeX made writing LaTeX arguably faster (and certainly prettier) than writing in Microsoft Word. My long-held desire, though, was to learn a programming language (I chose python) and code my own Content Management System. Events in meatspace have conspired against me acheiving that goal up to this point; now I am making progress. I can’t imagine working in any other editor. Oh wait: I can. I switched to vim for four months earlier this year.

Yes, I tried Vim

You heard me: I tried vim. My main motivation was a bout of Emacs Pinky. My left pinky occasionally gets sore if I spend too much time on the laptop. At the time I attributed it to the control sequences that Emacs uses, but now I’m more aware that it’s just that my laptop has an inelegant and potentially harmful keyboard. If I use an ergonomic keyboard with Emacs, I’m fine.

Vim was fine. It’s a great text editor. If you want a powerful text editor, your two choices are vim and Emacs, and though I prefer Emacs, I won’t fault you for choosing vim. It does some fantabulous things. You can script it in python, for example. But scripting vim in python feels a lot like scripting Emacs in python; there’s a lot of cruft, and it doesn’t play well with the innards of the system like elisp does. And there were all these little things that I missed.

What I’m Doing With Emacs Now

I’m evolving into the type of person who tries to do as much as possible inside Emacs. Here’s a partial list of how I use it now:

• Email client
• Personal Planner
• Coding environment for my as-yet-unfinished CMS
• Twitter
• Writing Fiction
• irc
• limited web browsing (mostly online APIs for the python libraries I’m investigating)
• World Domination

Okay, I really haven’t used Emacs for world domination yet. But as I was reading The Golden Age, I was slightly disappointed when he was naming some of the far-future self-aware AI characters, and Emacs didn’t make the list.

In 2001, I was a freshman in college, which meant the closest thing to highspeed internet that I had hitherto experienced. Which upped my time surfing the web. One of the delightful sites I lighted upon was Ftrain.

One day, I dug through Ftrain’s archives and found Emacs Notepad. I was intrigued. Having exclusively used Word (and Notepad to edit HTML – ha!) up until that point, this Emacs thingy sounded fascinating. I downloaded a Windows version right away.

I soon found that the Windows port of Emacs was stuck on version 19, and the rest of the Emacs-lovin’ universe was using version 21 on some posix-compliant operating system. I decided to hope and pray that soon the Emacs developers would take a little time out to help us poor souls using Windows.

It was a long wait. A long wait in which I could not get LaTeX to work. So long, in fact, that the next fall, with the aid of a new dorm-mate, I dual-booted Red Hat 9 Linux.

What’s great about Emacs, and about free software in general, is that I have as much control as I desire over my computer. I haven’t taken the time to install Linux from scratch, but if I wanted to, the tools are there, and there aren’t any proprietary hindrances or DRM snafus to thwart my progress. My limited ability to understand maths may hinder me, but my software isn’t.

So actually, I am indebted to Emacs for not only making my computing life much easier and more productive, but from freeing me from the limitations of Microsoft. Although I see I didn’t really describe just how it has made my computing life easier, or more productive. I’ll have to remedy that in a future post.

DISCLAIMER: I never said it was a good story of a man and his favorite text editor.