: Re: emacs for creative writing Does anyone know a good emacs configuration for creative writing? I'd be looking for the ability to write, edit, and export to libre office or word (so the less technical

@Bethany377

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If you want to work within emacs, I would consider org-mode; it's what I'm currently using for writing projects (amongst other things).

First and foremost, it's an outliner, with facilities for structuring your document(s) hierarchically. If you want to plan a story out into acts, acts into sequences, sequences into scenes, maybe scenes into beats...structuring it hierarchically in an outliner is perfect. If you don't want to impose much structure, you don't have to -- use as little or as much as you want.

It supports basic markup. It supports hyperlinks within your document, between your org documents (kind of like your own little private wiki), and to other types of documents or web pages or what-have-you. And, it supports exporting to a variety of formats (including HTML, LaTeX/PDF, and cleaned up ascii-text). It's a very deep, powerful program written within emacs, and creative writing is one of many things you can do with it. A version of it comes with modern emacs distributions, but I recommend downloading and using the most current version.

There are many modes that come with a modern emacs distribution that may help as well. I would be sure to enable flyspell-mode for spell checking as you compose, visual-line-mode for word wrapping to the editor window if you don't want to insert hard newlines, possibly linum-mode for displaying a running count of line numbers in the left-hand margin.

I personally like visualizing my whitespace glyphs (tabs and newlines in particular) and whitespace-mode can be configured to display these things subtly instead of gaudily. I would recommend against visualizing the "space" character...with a monospaced font, it should be pretty obvious that all the places that are not actual ascii characters, tabs or newlines are in fact space characters. The desire to do this may come from the fact that I'm a programmer using emacs first, and a semi-aspiring writer using emacs second.

Use google and the emacswiki for learning about all things emacs, and the tutorials on the org-mode website for org mode. The hack emacs series by rpdillon has a number of episodes on org-mode which I found to be useful.

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