Emacs can be anything you want it to be: a coding environment, an outliner, a task manager, and everything in between. You can transform this versatile text editor into a tool for writing articles, drafting blog posts, and penning your next great novel (Figure 1). As is often the case, the exact Emacs configuration and customizations depend on your specific needs and usage scenarios, but there are several tweaks and plugins you might find useful no matter what writing tasks you plan.

Configuring and Extending Emacs

The .emacs file in your home directory specifies Emacs' default behavior and configures a wide range of settings. The example configuration in Listing 1 contains several useful commands and options. The default monospaced font and line spacing make regular text difficult to read, and the set-default-font and setq-default line-spacing expressions let you specify the desired font (it must be installed on your system), font size, and line spacing. In this case, Emacs is set to use the Mononoki font at the 17pt size.

By default, Emacs doesn't do soft word wrap – a de rigueur feature of any decent word processor. But, you can enable this functionality by toggling the visual line mode using the M-x visual-line-mode expression. To avoid doing this manually every time you work with text in Emacs, add the global-visual-line-mode t) expression to the .emacs file. On-the-fly spellcheck is another indispensable feature for any writer, and Emacs supports this functionality via the flyspell mode. You'd probably want to enable spellcheck only when working in the text mode, and this can be done by adding the (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode) hook expression.

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