Emacs Writing Studio

Emacs Writing Studio by Peter Prevos is a configuration and comprehensive manual for writers seeking an integrated research, writing and publication tool. The EWS book discusses everything from researching and organising ideas and writing without distractions to publishing in multiple formats. EWS is useful to 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 or LeanPub. 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 a maintained Emacs package. For beginning Emacs users, it 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, like to include additional packages useful to authors or fix some typos in the text.

EWS Workflow

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

• Inspiration relates to reading, listening to and watching media such as e-books or lectures. Emacs can maintain and consume your bibliography or media collection.
• Ideation is the phase where we reflect on the ideas of others and develop our own. Emacs acts as a note-taling system in this phase.
• Production is the actual writing phase. EWS focuses on the capabilities of the Org mode package for writing projects.
• Publication is the last phase in which Org mode files are converted to the final product in ePub, PDF or office format.

Another part of being a researcher and writer is Administration, which is not a phase in the process as such, but nevertheless essential. Administration in the EWS context relates to managing files and projects.

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 activates and installs 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.

Compiling the EWS book

This repository contains the Org mode source files for the Emacs Writing Studio book.

To compile the book as a PDF, ePub or other format you need the EWS configuration and the required supporting applications listed above. You will also need the Graphviz software, which draws some of the diagrams used in the book. Run the Org export function from the 00-emacs-writing-studio.org file to generate the book.