Emacs Writing Studio

Emacs Writing Studio by Peter Prevos is an Emacs configuration and comprehensive guide for writers seeking to streamline their workflow. The book covers everything from organising ideas and writing distraction-free to publishing in multiple formats. It’s perfect for 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 source code of the complete book is available in the documents folder, so you can also ‘roll your own’.

Feel free to raise an issue if you have any suggestions on how to enhance the configuration or like to see additional packages useful to authors. Alternatively, join the GitHub discussion forum.

EWS Workflow

The EWS configuration and associated website and book follow a basic workflow for authoring documents. The chapters of the book follow this basic workflow and introduce new Emacs concepts as needed.

Install EWS

The EWS configuration follows the following principles:

• Stay as close as humanly bearable to vanilla GNU Emacs
• Leverage functionality in Emacs 29
• Standard keyboard shortcuts
• No configuration for writing code (prog-mode)
• Centred around Org mode

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

To install the EWS configuration, download the init.el and ews.el files from the 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.

Copy both files from the EWS repository to this directory. EWS will activate after you evaluate the restart-emacs function or the next time you start the program.

Experienced Emacs users, can try the EWS configuration by cloning this repository and start Emacs with emacs --init-directory <folder-path>. That way you can try EWS without clobbering your existing configuration.

The EWS configuration works independent of the operating system you use. However, the system does rely on a set of supporting applications that Emacs uses to undertake specialised tasks.

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, a message will appear in the *Messages* buffer listing the missing software. Some of the listed packages are alternatives for each other, for example (convert or gm). The core functionality of Emacs will work fine without this software, but some specialised tasks require assistance from this software.

Inspiration

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

Ideation

• grep: Search inside files

Production

• dot (GraphViz): Create note network diagrams (not discussed in the book, but required to produce the e-book or paperback version)
• hunspell: Spellcheck. Also requires a hunspell dictionary
• divpng: Part of LaTeX

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