this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Writing

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A specific community for original shortform and longform writing, stories, worldbuilding, and other stuff of that nature.

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Was curious to see what tools everyone uses for both writing and storage.

Personally I use Word for writing, Excel for planning and progress tracking, and a local MediaWiki server for note taking.

What about you?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Emacs + orgmode. Quite technical, not for the faint of heart, but it is an amazing tool to keep everything in plain text. If you are not a technical person, probably this is not for you, as it requires quite the tinkering, but once configured to your workflow, it is very good.

Second place for Manuskript (source code), that is an open source scrivener-like application. I like it a lot, but I always go back to emacs, but probably someone here can appreciate it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Although I like GNU Emacs a lot (it is my IDE, my scratchpad, my IRC client, my Matrix client, my Gopher browser and my part-time e-mail reader) and I use org-mode for my TODO lists and structuring for my more complex blog posts, I (personally) consider it inadequate for writing long-form prose. I always feel that it expects me to have a list wrapped around it. I know that org-novelist exists, but it tries to enforce a workflow that's not mine.

I just had a brief look at Manuskript and it crashes immediately. I think I'll wait for 1.0.0 before I try again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Similar: I use Codium with a vim input plugin and keep everything in plaintext as well. I write in markdown and use small scripts and tools like pandoc to produce epub versions that I can take with me on my phone. I use the notation features in my e-reader to do editing. All content except for a couple fonts and images are textual, making it ideal for tracking changes with git.