Emacs Writing Studio

Emacs Writing Studio (EWS) is a configuration and a series of articles for authors who want to use Emacs to research and publish articles, books, scripts and websites. EWS is also a forthcoming ebook and paperback, which is an expanded version of the blog posts.

This configuration follows the following principles:

• Leverage functionality in Emacs 29
• Standard keyboard shortcuts
• No configuration for writing code
• Centred around Org mode

Feel free to raise an issue if you have any suggestions on how to enhance the configuration or like to see additional packages useful to authors.

Install EWS

To install the EWS configuration, download the init.el and ews.el files from the GitHub repository and save them in the configuration folder.

The location of the configuration folder depends on your operating system and Emacs version. Type C-h v user-emacs-directory to identify its location in the popup help buffer. You can close this buffer by pressing q.

Copy both files from the EWS repository to this directory. EWS will activate after you evaluate the restart-emacs function or the next time you start the program.

If you an experienced Emacs user, then you can try the EWS configuration by creating a separate folder for the init file and start Emacs with emacs --init-directory <folder-path>. That way you can try EWS without clobbering your existing configuration.

External Packages

Emacs Writing Studio also depends on a series of other software that Emacs interfaces with to do various tasks. When EWS starts, a message will appear in the *Messages* buffer listing the missing software. Some of the listed packages are alternatives for each other, for example (convert or gm).

• soffice (LibreOffice): View and create office documents
• zip: Unpack ePub documents
• pdftotext (poppler-utils): Convert PDF to text
• djvu (DjVuLibre): View DjVu files
• curl: Reading RSS feeds
• dot (GraphViz): Create note network diagrams
• Convert image files
  • convert (ImageMagick)
  • gm (GraphicsMagick)
• latex (TexLive, MacTex or MikTeX): Preview LaTex and export Org to PDF
  • divpng: Part of LaTeX
• hunspell: Spellcheck. Also requires a hunspell dictionary
• Search inside files
  • grep
  • ripgrep: Faster alternative for grep
• View PDF files
  • gs (GhostScript): View PDF files
  • mutool (MuPDF): View PDF files
• Play music
  • mpg321, ogg123 (vorbis-tools), mplayer, mpv, vlc