thoughtbot
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2024
1:01:06 · 153K views · Oct 7, 2015
Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.
Recommended as a favorite talk showing Emacs as a writing environment rather than just a programmer's editor.
6 comments from Hacker News
My favourite talk on this topic is "Emacs for writers": this video If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.
There is always Emacs. I love this talk by Joe Dixit about how he came from things like scrivener to Emacs this video
I'm not sure if I would define it as a "talk" (and the details are more meaningful if you know how to use Emacs), but Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs for writing instead of programming: this video
I saw this a couple of weeks ago: this video I really like how he has no idea how to pronounce stuff, but he still managed to bend emacs after his will.
> 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. [LINK] . "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." this video Spoiler: I skimmed it and it's as I thought - it's largely about Emacs