 Are you a serious writer? And by a serious writer, I mean, do you write novels, short stories, poetry, do you do any kind of creative writing, or maybe you do some scientific writing, maybe you write journals, do you make a living, do you earn a paycheck writing? If you do, chances are you probably use like a traditional word processor to get all that work done, but you don't have to. A lot of people use extensible text editors to get that work done, and by extensible text editors, the two that I'm mainly talking about, of course, are Vim and Emacs. And Emacs, especially, I see a lot of professional writers using Emacs. I see that these guys in Emacs forums, places where people talk about what they do in Emacs, I see professional writers using Emacs. Emacs is not just for programmers. Unfortunately, to configure Emacs to your liking, you do have to learn some E-list, and you have to basically write your custom Emacs editor. But beyond that point, what you do with Emacs, it's not just for programmers. You can be a professional writer and write novels and short stories and what have you inside Emacs, because Emacs has hundreds of plugins out there available for this kind of work. And today I wanted to share with you a handful of useful plugins and useful modes. So the first mode I want to share with you guys is the most important one, but I'm just going to briefly cover it because I've done videos on this particular mode before. And that is org mode. Org mode is by far the number one reason why people that write for a living use Emacs. Org mode is amazing. Org mode is this markup kind of language that allows you to do outlining and scheduling, you know, task lists. It allows you to create tables. It allows you to do literate programming for those of you that want to do that sort of thing. But specifically for writers, the outlining aspect is what is really amazing here in org mode. Now, again, I've done previous videos discussing some of the basics of how to learn org mode. So go check my previous videos. Actually, this document, this org document I opened up was my show notes from that previous video that I did. Right now, this org mode document is folded. So I have these top level headlines. So imagine this is an outline. All of these are these top level headlines. If I hit shift tab on the keyboard, I can unfold this. So now, you know, you see I have several levels in this outline. I basically made an outline during that example org mode video I did previously. If I do shift tab one more time, I can unfold this even further and I get some other stuff unfolding, including a checklist that I had made. Apparently I made a shopping list, eggs, milk, beer. And then I exed out the beer because apparently I remembered to pick it up. I still need to go get the eggs and milk, unfortunately. I did have a deadline for something probably my shopping list. I created a table just to show you guys how easy it is to create a table in org mode. And pretty much anything you want to do, writing wise, you can get done in org mode. Now, after you've written your novel or your short story or your paper or whatever it is you've written in org mode, of course, then you need to be able to export it into other formats. And you can export org documents to a lot of different formats within Emacs directly. You can export to ODT, the open document format. So maybe you write your novel in org mode, but later you want to open it up in something like LibreOffice Writer. So you can add a little other formatting, maybe something that you couldn't do in org mode. It does allow you to export directly to ODT. You can also export to LaTeX. Those of you that use LaTeX, you can export to Markdown. You can export to HTML, which is very useful because not everybody writes and then does print publication. Maybe you just write something and you want to directly publish it to a website, sometimes just being able to export it to HTML is a very handy feature. Now, as great as org mode is, I don't know why anybody wouldn't want to use org mode, but there are a number of other markup style languages people can use other than org if you want to. I'll briefly mention one other one that is pretty popular among writers and that is Muse. So I do have an example of a Muse document somewhere on my system here. So yeah, I titled this first dot Muse and it's very similar to something like org mode. It's not as powerful, but it does have some outlining abilities. You can see first level, second level, third level, same thing with asterisks. You can see the headings at the top for author date description and the title. It gets a little bigger font. I did some examples of emphasis, strong emphasis, very strong emphasis. These are done with asterisks. So if I get into insert mode, you guys can see that if I wrap a word with single asterisks, it's emphasis. And the strong emphasis is you probably already guessed it would be two asterisks. Very strong is three asterisks surrounding the word. Underlined is underscores surrounding the word. Verbatim and monospace are the equal sign surrounding the word. Let me get in there and I will show you the equal signs. All right, let me put that back to the proper formatting. I copied a brief example of writing poetry. Poetry requires that white space be preserved. So what you do is you start these lines with the greater than sign. That's the right pointing chevron and you can space the lines of poetry, how you need them to space and it'll actually reserve that space for you. If you wanted to, you could also wrap your poetry in something like these tags here, the verse tags. Much like org mode, you can do tables. The tables and muses are not as cool as the tables and org mode not as powerful. Basically, muse is a kind of poor man's org mode. You can do hyperlinks, you know, a lot of the same stuff you can do in org mode. Org mode just takes it to another level. One of the most important features, of course, for writers is spell checking. There are a number of spell checkers out there for you in Emacs. There's a spell, there's hun spell, there's fly spell. My particular distribution of Emacs is called doom Emacs. And I believe it does have fly spell installed. I don't believe it is enabled though. So if I try to enable fly spell mode, yeah, I just get an error. They have it not enabled by default is because most people don't need a spell checker. Obviously, if you're doing creative writing, you're going to want it. But a lot of people that use Emacs are doing it for programming and, you know, other stuff. And they don't want to enable fly spell or any spell checker by default is because of the overhead from running those programs. Emacs noticeably slower because I mean, it's searching through every word and a document, especially if it's a long document. You know, it's got to do a lot of work to figure out the spelling mistakes and the suggestions for the fixes. Another useful mode for people that are writing, especially those of you that write for news journals, news websites. Oftentimes they have a certain word count. They want you to try to get. Your news articles to be at least 500 words, but maybe no more than a thousand words, something like that. And having a word count plugin is especially useful for those that need it. So if I enable WC mode, so it's word count mode WC dash mode. I don't know if do me max had this plugin installed by default or if I had to install it. I can't remember. Once you enable WC mode and then you need to go back and run the WC dash count command. And it will tell me exactly how many words were in this document. I moved my mouse so it. But look at the very bottom of the screen. There's 41 lines to this document. 161 words, 1066 characters. So pretty cool WC mode. Another interesting mode is write good mode. So if I do alt X on the keyboard and I do write good, all one word write good dash mode. Let me go ahead and enable that mode. Now that I have the right good mode enabled. If I go back and do alt X on the keyboard and type write good all one word again dash. You see other than enabling the right good mode, I had the option of also running right grade level, write good version, write good reading ease. So write good reading ease. Let's do that one for a test that basically tests this document for reading ease. It's going to judge it and it's going to give us a score. Actually, let's do grade level. That's the one that basically tells us how easy to read our document is. So first of all, if you want to select the whole document, I'm using the evil key bindings here. I'm just going to GG to go to the top of the document shift V to get into visual mode. Capital G to go at the end of the document. We just selected the whole document. And now I'm going to run write good dash grade dash level. And at the bottom of the screen, you see our flesh cancade grade level score is 6.87. I don't know if that's a good score. I don't know if that's a bad score. But those of you that need this write good is a pretty cool plugin. The last mode I want to briefly touch on is called write room and write room is nice because a lot of people that do writing, you know, especially once you really get into especially fiction, you just start writing and you're really into it. And you want a distraction free page. You don't want anything else. No line numbers, no vertical splits and horizontal splits. You don't want to see status bar. You want as much removed from the page as possible. And there is a mode such as that for Emacs. It's called write room mode. So if I do meta X here and type right room, all one word dash mode and enable that. And you can see what happens. Pretty much everything goes away. Now I still have the line numbers enabled. I could actually get rid of the line numbers if I wanted to. So the line numbers here in do me max are displayed dash line dash numbers dash mode. And if I just toggle that mode off, I get rid of the line numbers. And you see it's a very clean look and it's centered in the middle of the screen. And all you have is the document you're working on and the status stuff in Emacs goes away. There is a hint of a little bit of a status line at the bottom, but it's not your typical do me max status line. And again, it's a really cool mode. That's called right room mode for distraction free writing. I myself, I don't write for a living and I don't actually use any of the stuff. I discussed on this video other than org mode because org mode is useful for a wide variety of uses. But even though I'm not a professional writer, I get a lot of people that view my YouTube channel that know I use Emacs. A lot of you guys write for a living and I get these questions a lot about, hey, what can Emacs do for me as far as you guys that write for a living? So I'm throwing it out there. Those are a few of the plugins for Emacs that I see a lot of writers use. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think Michael Gabe Nate, Corbinian Mitchell, Entropy UK, John Devin Fran, Art5530, Chris, DJ Nani, Dylan George Lewis, I'm Repaul Robert, Sean Tobias and Willie. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys. The community. If you'd like to support my work, you'll find ETO for on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.