Emacs For Writers - Jay Dixit on how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer, and how Emacs has made him a more productive writer, editor, and researcher

Steven Brust also uses Emacs.

Presentation from 2015. But I love this presentation, I like hearing stories from non-programmers/IT people who learn how to use Emacs.

I believe Neal Stephenson does as well, or at least did at one time. In _In the Beginning was the Command Line_ he described it as "a thermonuclear word processor." > In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by RichardStallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. 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. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish

He said in an interview in the mid-2000s that he's moved away from Emacs to Scrivener, so I was surprised to find out that (as of 2021) he still uses Emacs.

They always come back. Lord knows I’ve tried to use other editors. It never sticks.

I think he still uses it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC5yGM8fk8g

Wow! I love that write-up! I'm a programmer and a writer, and I love to see other writers adopt emacs. Most bail out on the steep side of learning curve though.

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