An emacs setup for writers looking for an alternative to traditional writing software
I'm a writer and fan of NaNoWriMo. That means that normally I write at least a new story of 50000 words every year. So I needed a tool, that supports me in that.
Until 2018 I opened emacs a few times (as it's just part of my linux system) but it just seemed too complex and too different for me. But as a writer I need a tool that supports my creative processes, does not disturb me too much and gives me all the information I need as quickly as possible. I started (as many) with Word / OpenOffice / Google Docs but soon noticed it's not really helping me. Then I tried some "writing tools" like Scrivener, Bibisco or Manuskript, but they all lacked something I needed (Ok, I don't know that for Scrivener, but I never got the Linux version running stable on my system and they stopped updates for linux anyways...).
All of those tools had great features, but none had all the features and user experience I really wanted. What I needed was a combination of all the advantages of those tools. Then I heard about emacs and that you can do nearly everything with it. I googled and found a video of Jay Dixit (you find it on youtube), who uses emacs for his writing. I chose his setup for a first try and it worked ... okayish. He uses vim keybindings and I really struggled with it. But I had my first experiences with emacs, saw what was possible and decided to give it a try.
I googled again, tried a lot, copied a lot from existing setups (as I'm really not good in this elisp thing...) and two months later I had a setup that was ready for NaNoWriMo. And here it is :-)