Better than a stack of sacks

Greg Newman is collecting entries for the Emacs Carnival. This is my entry on why I prefer Emacs for writing.

I don’t know if I imagined this or read it in a story. It’s about this guy who carries a drab, innocuous looking sack with him everywhere he goes. When he’s hungry, he reaches into his sack and pulls out a piping hot meal fit for a king. When he’s in danger, he pulls out magic weapons to defend himself with, and when he wants to charm the ladies, the sack offers up bouquets of flowers adorned with colourful butterflies. Nobody pays attention to this magic sack, because what it looks like on the outside is nothing like what it does on the inside and since most people judge a book (or a sack) by its cover, nobody catches on.

Nobody catches on because sacks aren’t meant to be magic. Sacks are supposed to hold what you put in them. If you put a bunch of potatoes in your sack, potatoes are what you should expect when you empty it. Not rabbits. Or never ending ribbons of silk. Just potatoes.

I’ve used other software for writing before I discovered Emacs, and they all behave the way a normal sack should. Maybe the people who build software for writers tell themselves that it should contain exactly those things that a writer needs. I imagine they seek out writers and ask them what software for writers should do. “Um… I must be able to write with it…” says the writer, waving his notebook and pen, adding, “maybe it can check my spelling.”

Having thus established user needs and discovering that Henry Ford¹ was onto something when he made that quip about faster horses, the developers build something that writers can write with. They add a spell checker, and because at this point they realise what they have built is basically a nicer looking notepad, they also add a distraction-free Zen mode as a product differentiator, since, fundamentally speaking, it is hard to improve upon a sack.

But then, trying to define writing is like trying to define walking, or eating, or talking. We write, walk, eat, and talk differently each time, depending on the situational context.

Writing a business proposal² is different from writing a blog post, or a short story, or a diary entry. They are all modes of writing, which is why there are so many types of writing software in the market today, and which probably explains the workflows I come across in which people use Drafts and Scrivener and IA Writer and Obsidian and half a dozen other software in what they call their ‘writing stack’.

Sacks within sacks, within banal stacks.

I’m not judging³. Really. I’ve been there before, and I’m just glad I found Emacs. When I need to write, I just dip in and yank out the perfect set of tools for my writing situation, and if these tools don’t exist, my magic sack conjures them up for me.

This is my entry for the Emacs Carnival for July 2025. Greg Newman is the host for this month’s topic – Writing Experience. Visit this page to read the other entries.

Notes

If you came here looking for tips and techniques for writing on Emacs, I have you covered.
– Tony Ballantyne’s Emacs Writing Tips
– Edmund Jorgensen on how Emacs saved his novel
– Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line (txt file). No tips about writing on Emacs, but trust me, read it.
– Mediapathic’s Writing Prose while Doomed (thread on writing prose on Doom Emacs)
– Jackmoe’s Creative writing with Emacs