4 ms·
I think you've misunderstood why someone would prefer Scrivener or a word processor: a rich-text ecosystem that "just works", in terms of WYSIWG / rich text edi
by michaericalribo 6y ago
I think you've misunderstood why someone would prefer Scrivener or a word processor: a rich-text ecosystem that "just works", in terms of WYSIWG / rich text editing; being the de facto standard for many non-technical user; and being more than "as simple as Markdown", but actively providing a tight ecosystem focused on writing.
Is it possible to recreate some of this functionality in emacs? Definitely. But, it requires a lot of patience, exploration, and determination.
Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file?
You've received a .docx draft from a friend, or copy for your book blurb, or a press release for your upcoming publication. How do you edit that .docx and return it in better shape than you found it?
You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of. How do you quickly navigate between these multiple sources of content, marking things up, merging different aspects of documents?
I'm a die-hard emacser, and I do a lot of personal and academic writing in LaTeX. But honestly, have you ever had to reformat a LaTeX manuscript for journal publication? It can take hours just to get the damn file to compile.
emacs is worth the time, if you're inclined to tinker and invest the effort to get it to work—but for me, at least, that's a hobby. It's disingenuous to present it as a real competitor to industry-standard workhorse word processors. And most writers with a day job can barely find time to write, "investing time in emacs" is a nonstarter for getting things done! In fact, I tune my own org-basaed PIM system as a way to avoid getting real work done...
- dleslie 6y ago> Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file? https://orgmode.org/manual/Comment-Lines.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Comment-Lines.html > You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of. https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Internal-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Internal-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Handling-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Handling-Links.html
- michaericalribo 6y agoTo be clear, by "your editor", I don't mean emacs—I mean the person who works at a publisher: she knows that a gnu is just a wildebeest and inheritance bequeathal of wealth; assumes "C-c ;" is just an obscure emoji; and will not waste her time indulging a writer who uses an obscure [1], roundabout way of entering text into M$ Word. Look, again, you're preaching to the choir—I use emacs every day. But writing a Python script to generate my org-native ToC to navigate reference materials is just...a very different, more work-intensive beast than an interactive drag-and-drop IDE tailored to the needs of professional writers. Impossible to approximate, with enough determination? No. Possible to start using intuitively within the first 15 minutes? Also: no. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-most-popular-development-environments https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...
- dleslie 6y agoI understood what you meant. "Open my doc in notepad or any other text editor. Put comments wherever you want; if you'd be so kind as to put them on their own line with a # at the start it would save me some time." Easy peasy. The beauty of org is that it's just a text file. You don't need Emacs to edit it.
- mattl 6y agoAnd then you have line endings and weird control characters and emoji don’t work in Emacs, etc etc I too have used Emacs a lot. I’m getting off the boat.
- dleslie 6y agoUTF Emojis work in Emacs, and control characters are displayed and easily removed. If you're git-savvy it's even easier to merge the comments in by using Magit and reviewing the changes individually.