|dreams

I’m a journalist so I write in natural languages (Swedish in my case) for a living. Like anyone who writes professionally I spend a lot of time using text editing programs. When I moved from Windows to Linux in 1999 I spent a lot of time looking for a decent word processor. After a while I realized that there weren’t any and I started writing my articles in the same text editor I used for programming: Gnu Emacs.

Open source has changed a lot since then. There are now a lot of stable FLOSS word processors. But after having become accustomed to writing in a proper text editor I’ll never go back to the world of word processors. I’ve come to really like emacs and I’ve also realized that word processors really aren’t for me anyway. A lot of people have written about the evils of word processors. This quote from Neal Stephenson pretty much sums it up:

If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.,

I’ve been writing all my articles in emacs since 2000 or so. A while back a colleague told me about Writeroom. He was just amazed at how good he felt about using this program. The reason he said was that it would allow you to see your text and nothing else. No menus, no desktop, no email notification, no distractions.

actually had me intrigued. One of the few features I’ve missed from MS Word is the ability zoom text so that the text size on the screen (not on the printed page, that’s not my business) is easy to read. (The other feature I really missed is an integrated Swedish thesaurus).

Over the last few months I’ve been disciplining emacs to be more like Writeroom. The resulting configuration is still very meware-ish but usable for me to use on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve put up a permanent page for it here: http://pipedreams.polite.se/projects/emacswriteroom/