Emacs as a tool is incredibly versatile, with endless configuration options and extensibility through elisp, but one thing I’ve not seen up until recently was using it to write.

I am not a writer by default, but I do like to note things down, and I’ve always had trouble doing that consistently (i.e journaling). I actually haven’t found a super good reason, but it IS a separate program (not necessarily in terminal), that has fairly good vim keybindings (which I cannot live without), and has so much flexibility in configuration that it allows me to create both a writing environment and a solid programming environment.

Blogging is something I’ve always found hard to do, as I used to get too far into the markdown hole or try to build my own website… but if I’m just using org-mode and compiling cross then I don’t have to worry about the weird things like:

• Embedding Images
• Separating notes from content (compile specific files to markdown)
• Documenting my thinking process (I don’t have to open a vscode project, I can just open emacs and start writing what I’m thinking about)

After all, if I’m already in Emacs, why should I leave just to write?

I’m still working on getting a truly good writing setup, but for now I’ve got something that looks like this:

But I’m not sure if that’s my endgame, as I’m considering using writeroom-mode for the actual writing process and then auto-export my blog posts to my git repository.

So far, this is what it looks like with writeroom-mode:

This is a fairly good setup, maybe I’ll ditch the line numbers or whatnot for more of a “zen” type of look…

Until next time!