Emacs Writing Studio

Emacs Writing Studio by Peter Prevos is a configuration and comprehensive manual for writers seeking to streamline their workflow. The manual discuses everything from organising ideas and distraction-free writing, to publishing in multiple formats. It’s useful to both beginners and experienced Emacs users, offering practical tips and a tailored configuration to enhance your writing process.

If you like to support my work, then please purchase the EWS book from your favourite e-book retailer or a DRM-free download from PayHip. The Org mode source code of the book is freely available in the documents folder, so you can also ‘roll your own’ with the Org export functionality and associated external software (see below).

The EWS website explains the configuration. There is also a YouTube playlist to demonstrate how to use Emacs Writing Studio.

This repository is not actively maintained. For beginning Emacs users, the configuration acts as a starting point to develop a configuration. More advanced users can copy ideas. The code will only be updated when there are bugs due to future changes in packages or Emacs itself.

The EWS configuration follows the following principles:

• Stay as close as humanly bearable to vanilla GNU Emacs
• Leverage functionality of the latest Emacs version
• Standard keyboard shortcuts
• No configuration for writing code (prog-mode)
• Centred around Org mode

Feel free to raise an issue if you have any suggestions on how to enhance the configuration or like to include additional packages useful to authors.

EWS Workflow

The EWS configuration, associated website and book follow a basic workflow for authoring documents, visualised below.

Install EWS

The init.el file contains the basic configuration and ews.el defines a series of convenience functions.

To install the EWS configuration, download the init.el and ews.el files from this GitHub repository and save them in the configuration folder. The location of the configuration folder depends on your operating system and Emacs version. Type C-h v user-emacs-directory to identify its location in the popup help buffer.

EWS will activate and install the required packages after you evaluate the restart-emacs function or the next time you start the program.

Experienced Emacs users, can try EWS configuration, without clobbering your existing configuration:

git clone https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio
emacs --init-directory emacs-writing-studio

Supporting Applications

Emacs is not only a text editor but also an interface to other software. EWS interface with software that Emacs uses for various tasks.

When EWS starts and some of the listed software is missing, the *Messages* buffer will list any missing software. The core functionality of Emacs will work fine without this software, but some specialised tasks require assistance from this software.

Installing these packages depends on your operating system.

Some of the listed packages are alternatives for each other, so you only need to install one of them.

Inspiration

• gs (GhostScript) or mutool (MuPDF): View PDF files
• pdftotext (poppler-utils): Convert PDF to text (enable search)
• soffice (LibreOffice): View and create office documents
• zip: Unpack ePub documents
• ddjvu (DjVuLibre): View DjVu files
• curl: Reading RSS feeds
• mpg321, ogg123 (vorbis-tools), mplayer, mpv, or vlc: Play music and watch videos

Ideation

• grep or ripgrep: Search inside files

Production

• hunspell: Spellcheck. Also requires a hunspell dictionary
• divpng: Preview mathematical notation (part of LaTeX)
• git: Version control

Publication

• convert (ImageMagick) or gm (GraphicsMagick): Convert image files
• latex (TexLive, MacTex or MikTeX): Preview LaTeX and export Org to PDF
• zip: Create ePub and office documents

To export the Emacs Writing Studio book Org files you will also must install Graphviz to generate various diagrams.