[NetBehaviour] Emacs For Art Writing

[Rob Myers]

http://robmyers.org/2011/10/12/emacs-for-art-writing/


The Emacs text editor has been in active development since the 1970s.
You can install it using your GNU/Linux distro's package manager or via
Apple's Mac OS X software site. Real writers use plain text, and Emacs
excels at editing plain text.

Emacs doesn't use the key commands that have become standard since it
was written, rather it uses a more expressive set of keypresses to
manipulate text. To find or create a file, you press Control and f then
Control and f (C-x C-f). To save a file you press Control and X then
Control and W (C-x C-w). Then to quit press C-x C-c .

Emacs contains its own tutorial (which you can access by pressing C-h
then just pressing t), and there's a handy reference sheet included when
you install Emacs or downloadable on the net (for example at
http://www.dsm.fordham.edu/~agw/emacs-refcard.pdf ).

Emacs is also programmable, using a version of the Lisp programming
language, and you can use this to extend and customise Emacs to better
fit how you work.

You can turn Emacs into a full-screen text editor -
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FullScreen

You can add on-the-fly spell checking -
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FlySpell

You can even turn Emacs into a powerful idea capturing, note-taking,
task list managing, publishing platform - http://orgmode.org/

Specifically for art writing, I've written an Emacs "minor mode" that
highlights mistakes such as use of the passive voice, weasel words, art
writing cliches ("artbollocks"), and lexical illusions (duplicate words)
- https://gitorious.org/robmyers/scripts/blobs/master/artbollocks-mode.el

Learning how to use Emacs is an investment that pays off massively,
turning your computer into a remarkably direct instrument for working
with text.