WEBVTT
NOTE Introduction
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Hi, I'm Peter Prevos, and I'll be talking about Emacs
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Writing Studio. I'm a water engineer, a social scientist,
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and I dabble in theatrical magic. For each of those
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endeavors, I do a lot of writing. I take notes, I write
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reports, articles, books, and websites. I use Emacs for all
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my research, my writing, and my publishing. Emacs Writing
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Studio is an opinionated starter kit for authors who write
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for humans, not for programmers who write for computers.
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It consists of a configuration, some bespoke
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functions, but are not yet a package, a website, and a book.
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The book is completely written with EWS itself. The target
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audience are authors who are frustrated with using
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commercial software and hopping from application to
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application to achieve an objective. These are people
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without any Emacs experience or coding skills.
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The objective is to teach these people how to use Emacs,
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not how to configure Emacs to manage a complete writing project.
NOTE Why?
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So why did I write a book about Emacs when the documentation is
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already so extensive? Most Emacs documentation focuses on
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configuration, burying potential new users with choices.
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It forces people to work on Emacs instead of with Emacs,
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and it quickly can become a productivity sink. Emacs is the
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ultimate free software platform, but with this freedom
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also comes a price. Barry Schwartz wrote about the
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paradox of choice, which is about the dramatic explosion in
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choices in the modern world. Just think about the amount of
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effort it can take to decide what cereal to buy in a
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supermarket that you haven't been before. So many
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different choices. Paradoxically, that's become a
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problem instead of a solution. Emacs can perhaps suffer
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from the same issue. Another objective, using a COVID-19
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trope: EWS is about flattening the curve--that is, the
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learning curve--by making these choices
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for the new Emacs user and avoiding the paradox.
NOTE EWS configuration
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What about this EWS configuration?
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I decided to stay as close as humanly
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bearable to vanilla Emacs. I say that tongue-in-cheek,
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but also with some realism, centered around Org mode
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and Denote for note tagging, and citar for accessing
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bibliographies, and other convenience packages such as
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vertico for minibuffer completion. There's a
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dictionary, a thesaurus, and some other packages that are of
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interest to authors. EWS uses the standard keyboard
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shortcuts. Writing is much more about thinking than about
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maximizing the amount of words per minute. Just think
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about that the most used function for authors is
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self-insert. There's no need to use fancy keyboard
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shortcut systems when you write prose.
NOTE How did I develop EWS?
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How did I go about developing Emacs? I declared Emacs bankruptcy,
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like we all have every now and then.
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I decided to write this book with
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vanilla Emacs and only configure the system as was
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required. The first thing I did, I hooked visual-line-mode
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to text-mode and off I went. The configuration grew as the
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need arose. I was actually surprised with how far you can
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get with just using Vanilla Emacs. I also developed two
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packages to enhance how I can use Denote.
NOTE Overall workflow
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Well, let's get to a demo.
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EWS is based on a typical research and writing workflow.
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First step is you need to get some inspiration.
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Usually we do that by reading, by watching, by
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listening. Then the next step is ideation. You develop your
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ideas, summarize ideas from other people, write down your
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own ideas. For that, you need a note-taking system. EWS
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also talks about managing bibliographies. The third step
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is production. This is the actual writing process where, in
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this case, the EWS book. Once that is finished, we
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convert this Org mode file into something that can be
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published. That might be an e-book in an EPUB format, or a
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PDF for the interior of a a paperback book or perhaps as an
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e-book as well. There's also configuration in Emacs to
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produce MS Word documents if you need to collaborate with
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other people. Let's jump in to Emacs and walk through this
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workflow, give you a very quick demonstration of what's in
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the box.
NOTE Inspiration
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So the first step in the EWS workflow is inspiration. We all
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stand on the shoulders of each other. Some giants; most of
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them are normal people. We get inspiration by reading,
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listening, and watching, and Emacs can help you access
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text, sound, and video. It depends on external software.
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Emacs acts as a beautiful interface, and EWS helps you
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with the configuration. But we also need a tool to manage our
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electronic library, and BibTeX
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and citar package by Bruce D'Arcus
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provides a perfect interface to manage this
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literature. If I open my bibliography here, you see that
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I've got 1864 references in my BibTeX files. There's a
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whole bunch of stuff about, I guess, the weird things that I
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read. Let's look for Emacs, right, because that's a joint
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interest that we have. Let's open here this paper by
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Marcus Birkenkrahe, who did some research using Emacs to teach
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data science. Data science is my day job, so that had my
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interest. We have here a Denote file, which I'll talk
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about in a second. There's a library file, which is a PDF, but
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it could be a whole collection of different files in
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different formats, even video or sound. We can create a new
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Denote file, or there's a link to the document object
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identifier. Let's go to the PDF. Here we can now do our
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reading. We can get our inspiration by what Marcus has
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written here about teaching data science with literary
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programming tools.
NOTE Ideation
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Next step is ideation. Taking notes is
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the core of all creativity. When I read that paper, I might
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want to copy some ideas, I might get some of my own ideas, and I
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need to write that down. I basically write everything in a
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paper notebook, but then I transfer the things that are
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worth keeping to the Denote note-taking system. Now, there
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are many systems that exist out there that promise you
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note-taking heaven when you just follow a certain process.
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My advice: don't worry about Zettelkasten, PARA, or
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whatever is out there. Just write your notes and worry about
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structure and all that later. Even Niklas Luhmann, the
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inventor of Zettelkasten, called his system a septic tank
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of ideas. I call my collection of notes a primordial soup
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from which my books emerge. Now, Denote by Prot Stavrou is a
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flexible note-taking system that can implement any of the
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popular methods. I transferred thousands of files to
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this format, so all my information is at my fingertips. We
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can jump to the Denote directory. In my case, that's
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~/documents/notes. We see here the marvel that is Denote,
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which is its ingenious file naming convention that has a
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timestamp, a title, and some (what do we call them) tags or
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categories, whatever you please. This is a very quick way
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to find things. Then there is an ews-dired-narrow function.
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For example, I can find anything,
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_ews means anything that has the EWS tag, and
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there we go, it's narrowed down in my EWS notes.
NOTE denote-explore
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Now, this is all very well, but I also decided to
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write a package called denote-explore,
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which helps us sort of explore these collections of notes.
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One of the fancy things we can do is
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do some visualization.
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Let's go to the network function and create a community of
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notes. A community is a collection of notes that match a
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regular expression, _ews. All the notes here
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that are on this list, the ones with the EWS tag. In a second,
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my browser pops up. I shall move that to my other window in a
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second. There we go. denote-explore creates a SVG file and
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it creates an arrow between all the nodes that are linked.
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It puts a title up there when the node has more than two links
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going in or out. We can also click on the note to read it in
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the browser, if you choose. If you set up Firefox properly,
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I'm sure it can also go into Emacs. This is the note tagging
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that's available within EWS.
NOTE Writing with Org
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Now, we've taken all these notes. Now we need to
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start writing stuff. Org mode, for me,
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is the ideal tool. Org mode is what you see is what you
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mean. The text and the syntax instruct the computer on how to
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produce the final result. This means that one file can
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become many different formats, an e-book, a printed book,
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or a website. It doesn't matter. Now, a lot of people talk
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about what you see, what you get, and that we should have a
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what you see, what you get mode in Emacs. I think that's
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irrelevant, because showing the final result while you're
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writing is actually a distraction. Traditional writing,
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producing the content, and designing the layout and
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typesetting are separate processes done by different
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professionals. In Emacs Writing Studio, the writing is
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still done by a human. There are no provisions for large
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language models in EWS. But layout and typesetting is done
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by external software, be it CSS, LaTeX, or XML, all mediated
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by Org mode.
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EWS also has some other tools for case conversion,
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thesaurus, a dictionary that I haven't got time to show,
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but what I will show you is how the book functions,
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and then how we create these publications.
NOTE The project file
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Okay. Let's go to my project file.
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So these are the EWS chapters,
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and each chapter is an Org mode file.
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Let's go into the main document, which is set up with
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olivetti-mode just to make it easier to read. What we see
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here is all the fluff from Org mode. These are all the
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various bits of metadata that I used to create the final
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result. Then for each chapter, I have an inclusion.
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This references another file. I've got some properties.
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In this case, the forward is unnumbered. There's some notes.
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In this case, Prot actually wrote this for me. Then we
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can jump into that text. Then what we see at the bottom
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here is some inclusions for HTML. This is the EPUB version,
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but it's different in LaTeX. Again, the same file can
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serve different purposes.
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So now let's, as the final part of this demonstration,
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actually create the book, because the book's freely
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available. You can download the source files from GitHub,
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and you can roll your own. Let's open the dispatcher.
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We'll export the LaTeX and we want to open the file.
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Now this takes a minute because there's a lot happening within
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all this code, so I'll shorten this video. I'll be silent now.
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There we are. This is the Emacs Writing Studio PDF version,
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which will eventually become the interior for the
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paperback version.
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So the EWS book is available in all major e-book shops.
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I'm also working on a paperback, which I hope to finish when
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Emacs 30 comes out. But the Org Mode files that I use to
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produce the book, they're available in the GitHub
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repository, so you can also roll your own, because the EWS
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configuration is the one that I use to produce the book.
NOTE Conclusions
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Now, some conclusions from this journey is that the best way to
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learn is to teach. That was my personal objective. I
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learned a lot from systematically working out how to
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implement the EWS workflow. One of the surprising things
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that I learned is to have reliance on external software
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throughout the writing process. I spent a lot of time in
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the book about explaining these connections that Emacs is
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not just a text processor, it is also an interface with other
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software. Now, future developments, as I mentioned,
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there'll be a paperback version of the book when Emacs 30
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comes out, and I might reconfigure things a little bit. I'm
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only planning to update the configuration when packages
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break or with another major Emacs release, because I want to
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work with Emacs, not work on Emacs. A big thank you to
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Prot Stavrou, who helped me with Denote packages, and he
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also wrote the forward to the book. There's also several
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test readers that I met through Mastodon that helped me out
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quite a bit. Of course, all the Emacs and package
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developers without which none of this would exist. Thank
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you all for your attention, and I look forward to your
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questions and suggestions.
