Emacs for writers
Text Mode
With the pointers and useful tips in this article, you can turn Emacs into a powerful writing environment.
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.
Figure 1: Emacs can be transformed into a powerful writing environment.
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.
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