Today I’m not going to write a long article; instead I want to share with you a very interesting lecture by a guy who is intelligent, but he’s not a “computer programmer” at all - at least he wasn’t until he tried to find the right tool for writing a well organized paper, with an outline organization on one side of the tool and text on the other.
He tried using Microsoft Word - a very long time ago and he had one of these disasters with about fifty icons to do various different things; it quickly frustrated him.
He used Google to look up various tools to get the job done; he found a few outline tools; they were good for the outline but terrible for writing.
I’ll let him tell the story, but the title of this article reveals where he ended up: Emacs - but for a writer? Can you believe it? It’s long, but it’s quite entertaining, at least for a geek like me!
@andreas if you follow his posts and his references below the video, you can get HIS key bindings. Alternatively I currently use and recommend the Doom Emacs key bindings, but if you JUST want to write technical papers, maybe his bindings will be worth looking at too.
Do you have to play all the videos to spot and capture the references to those keybindings, or does he offer a URL to where those are compiled into a document (text/HTML/Emacs config, etc.)?
I have a means for capturing the entire video, if need be, but I don’t know if I need the visual resolution (full original video res) or if I only need the audio describing what those keybindings are?
I’m still looking for the right tool to use before attempting to write Science-Fiction.
That video Brian shared is a classic. It’s funny how non-technical folks sometimes stumble into Emacs out of sheer frustration with heavy word processors like MS Word. For long-form text and structuring complex stuff, Org-mode really is unmatched, especially that side-by-side outlining setup the speaker talks about.
I actually used to live in Emacs myself back in the day, though I’ve since moved on to a different workflow. But seeing threads like this always makes me a bit nostalgic for the sheer customizability of it. If you’re tackling a sci-fi novel, a plain-text approach with a solid outline setup definitely beats fighting with bloated layouts any day, whether you end up doing it in Emacs or something else.
I frequently still live in Emacs; in my final development team effort before I went into a long series of testing assignments, Emacs was all that I used.
Now that I’m retired I don’t have to use any particular editor, but editing has long been a hobby, so I oscillate between Geany, vi, Neovim, XnEdit, and Doom Emacs.
For typing and surprisingly useful search XnEdit ( a modern variation of the nineties vintage Nedit, once called “Nirvana”) , XnEdit is super simple, reasonably small and quite powerful. Doom Emacs is big, and it’s basically a combination of Vim, Emacs, and that powerful Org Mode stuff for doing outlines and documentation, so there’s still definitely a place for it. As for Neovim, I just find it interesting as the latest remake on the vi → Vim → Neovim progression.
