Words on a page

Sorry, but I couldn't find the text editor in Emacs.
  -- Wil Wheaton, writing in the colophon to Just A Geek

When some people find out that use the Emacs text editor as a primary writing tool, they shake their heads and ask "Why?" I've been using text editors to write for years. And Emacs does everything I need it to do and then some -- thanks mainly to a set of extensions that I've installed.

The long answer is a bit more complicated. In the Linux/UNIX world, there are two major camps of text editor users: those who use Emacs and those who use vi. Members of each camp can't understand why members of the other camp use the editor they do. In fact, the whole Emacs vs. vi debate has become something of a holy war.

But being an independent thinker, I refused to be drawn into this war. When I switched to Linux over six years ago, I did the same thing that I did when trying to find an editor for DOS and for Windows: I tried out as many editors as I could. I worked with Emacs, vi, several vi clones (including Vim), Nedit, SETEDIT, and numerous others. (OK, I'd been extensively using the UNIX versions of Emacs and vi for years at various jobs, but had to evaluate them on Linux just to be thorough.) I used each of them for weeks at a time, sometimes side by side. Then I made my choice.

As I mentioned earlier, I found that Emacs did everything that I want an editor to do. I'm not a programmer; I write for a living. Emacs gives me a very flexible environment in which to write. It has excellent support for typesetting documents in HTML, DocBook XML, and LaTeX. There are a number of useful Emacs extensions for writers, such as FlySpell, which does on-the-fly spell checking; psgmlx, which makes working with DocBook XML files easier; and Muse, which enables me to write documents and output them into one of several formats. On top of that, there is an extension to call HTML Tidy from within Emacs which I find incredibly useful when creating Web content.

That's not to say I don't use any other editor. I keep a copy of Nedit installed on my computer to edit system files and to write shorter articles and the like. But for me, Emacs works. And I can find the editor in Emacs. That's all that matters.