On Switching to Emacs

Late last year, I became intrigued by the potential of the "Org Mode" of the Emacs text editor to solve a variety of problems I was attacking simultaneously, quite apart from its legendary power as a text editor. The twin attractions of becoming better organized generally and having much less work to do along the way to developing a personal knowledge base overcame my reluctance to train myself to use the arcane software. Some time soon after that post, I decided the best way to learn Emacs would be to practice a little each day, by using it to create my blog posts in the morning.

I've barely started using Emacs in the way I ultimately intend, but I think it is worth noting the improvements to my writing work flow I have already achieved.

For the past few years, I'd been composing posts in Version 3.4.7 of TinyMCE, which provides WYSIWYG HTML editing within a tab of Firefox. (Interestingly, the toolbar is blown up out of proportion in the current version of Firefox, but not in that of Pale Moon, to which I recently switched.) For reasons I no longer remember, I was never able to save directly to disk from that editor, and so always had to copy and paste into another editor, gedit, from a special text editing window. (I often used that for other purposes, too, including certain edits.) Over the years, I had also accumulated a variety of scripts that made certain things easier, such as putting titles into title case or replacing junk characters in excerpts from other sites. To use these scripts I'd have to switch to yet another window than the browser (TinyMCE and whatever web page I was commenting on) and gedit. While superior, at least for the way I work, to the Blogger editor, this was still cumbersome and placed any work I was readying for publication at least partially at the mercy of any system freezes caused by Firefox. (See link for Pale Moon.) I was never satisfied with having to either type in HTML tags or use my mouse to select areas of text to which to apply a tag. It always seemed like I should be able to create a simple shortcut for tags I commonly used that I could type in as needed, or (a little like Markdown), to be able to use some kind of shorthand for later conversion to HTML. So I had an okay way to write posts that I was never completely happy with, and whose dependence on Firefox always bothered me. Also, with all the going back-and-forth between not completely compatible software tools, annoying types of errors (especially spelling) frequently wound up published.

Enter Emacs. The way I started out almost sent me back to TinyMCE: HTML-mode, no modifications to the editor itself, and not knowing how to do lots of simple things made editing anything for the first week or so a real chore. But I got better at the "Emacs way" of doing ordinary things, and started learning how to customize both the editor itself and the way I would interact with it when composing HTML (or anything else). Now, I simply type whatever is on my mind. If I need to stick in a link, I hit a couple of keys (that I got to choose) simultaneously (before pasting in the URL, again before the words to be highlighted, and again afterwards). Other formatting is even easier. For example, I use "qi" pressed simultaneously to insert italics tags AND move my cursor between them. CTRL-e skips past the end of any closing tag so I can keep writing. In addition to staying within the editor for normal things like saving the file, I also can run my editing scripts from within the editor, be it on a selection of text or the whole document. I also like many other features of the editor, such as the built-in spell-checker much more than anything I'd used before. For possible misspellings, it provides an enumerated list of alternatives, which can be selected simply by hitting a number key.

My work flow when writing is now much smoother than it has ever been. I can think more about what I want to say and less about how to make it look good. It is hard to quantify how much time Emacs saves me over my old way of editing since I am frequently interrupted while I work, but I'd estimate that composing a post takes about ten minutes less than it used to, discounting browser crashes or freezes, which are not an issue any more. (This is because (1) I no longer need a browser to edit and (2) I switched to one much less prone to these problems.) The editing process is certainly also far less annoying. In addition to the time savings, I now have an editor with two nice extra features, one of which I had wanted for some time and another I thought would be nice, especially when using a netbook's limited screen area. Regarding the first feature, Emacs has a built-in ability to offer a split-screen view of a document, which is quite helpful for long documents, and which I had been unable to find in text editors that met my other criteria for acceptable writing software. Regarding the second feature, I had often seen "minimalist" editors touted for "distraction-free writing". As you have probably guessed by now, I don't like bothering with using a mouse when I write. Emacs does have a toolbar enabled by default, but one day, I wondered: "You can change damned near anything in Emacs. I wonder If I can dump the toolbar and free up more space." A quick Internet search and a configuration file change later, Emacs now boots up without a toolbar. Now, I have exactly the editing environment of my dreams. That's a nice return on my effort, and I'm just learning its organizational capabilities (which have nevertheless also already proven helpful).

-- CAV