I used to use Emacs for this—the One True Editor. Yet, it has one flaw that disrupted my writing routine: it has too many features. When I encountered writer’s block or an idea I couldn’t quite articulate, I would start tinkering with the editor instead. Emacs is like a friend, and one should keep friends away from the workplace; otherwise, no work gets done.

For this reason, I began writing with ed some time ago. ed is not my friend; it’s the standard editor. It’s also the grandfather of vi, but fathers should not bear the vices of their sons.

Note from 2024: Ten years after writing this post, I’m editing it with Neovim, the grandson of all these tools.

ed was very nice to write with. It doesn’t have many features. It prints a 0 when it opens, I type i to insert text, and then I write whatever I like. When I put a lonely . on a line, it understands that I’ve finished my words. Then, with w, I save the file to disk and see its length—length in bytes, as every true writer nowadays should know.

ed is minimal, and while I occasionally get frustrated by its modal behavior, that’s exactly why I was happy to write with it.

However, I eventually decided that even pressing those few command keys was too much. i, ., and w—one can forget them easily. And it seemed I had a tendency to learn more of its commands, which are passed down to its grandchildren. God save us from the vices of vi.

Then, I decided to concoct a script that uses cat. Everyone knows writers like cats, and I like cat too; it concatenates text into files and is also used to print their content. It’s much simpler than ed—much simpler. It is not an ambiguous dork like ed; it’s a simple animal that writes into files whatever I type into it.

It was easy to check the file size in words after I finished. I wrote a while loop to continue until I reached my daily quota. The script creates a new file, adds an Org-mode header, and includes the contents of the clipboard just after the title so I can include notes. cat exits with Ctrl-D, and when it finishes, the script checks the word count. If I’m still short of my daily target, it appends a ----- separator and opens the file again. You have to finish your words, whether your brain bleeds or your cat dies.

The effect? I began using it today, so I’m still not sure about the long-term impact, but there’s certainly nothing to distract me. When I used Emacs, the info pages were highly entertaining—I was just finishing the command-line options of GNU Backgammon when I decided to switch. Modern programs are so customizable that I can’t even finish reading their manuals.

The script is shown below. It asks for a filename; if you don’t provide one, it creates one based on the date. It has some minor changes from the version I use, as I tend to name my files differently and I haven’t tested this specific version thoroughly, but here it is. Copy and paste it into a file named write-with-cat, make it executable with chmod +x write-with-cat, and run it. You’ll need a Unix-like system (even my mom uses Debian, you know).

The second part of the script, which I’ve commented out, copies the written material to a repository and commits it using Mercurial.

#!/bin/bash

WORDSIZE=600

echo "Please set a (tentative) name?"
read response
if [ -z "$response" ] ; then
    dirname=work-`date +%y-%m-%d`-$RANDOM
else
    dirname=work-${response}
fi

tempdirname="/tmp/$dirname"
mkdir $tempdirname
docname="$tempdirname/index.org"

selection=`xsel -ob`
cat > $docname <<EOF
#+TITLE: $response
#+AUTHOR:
#+DATE: `date`

$selection
EOF

clear
cat $docname

while [ `wc -w "$docname" | cut -f 1 -d ' '` -le $WORDSIZE ] ; do
    cat >> $docname
    echo "\n-----" >> "$docname"
    wc -w "$docname"
done

It’s hard to tell for those who use their editors with mouse clicks on pretty icons, but once you catch this virus called doing everything from the keyboard, it becomes attached to your digital (from digitus, finger) psyche, making it impossible to leave behind. I even purchased an Android keyboard for my phablet just to ssh to my home and write with Emacs. Consider that!

Today I stumbled upon several posts regarding favorite Emacs packages and wanted to list mine.

org-mode

I’m not writing this in org-mode because I observed that I can detail, micro-revise, and lose focus while writing because of its extensive functionality. Instead, I’m using Zsh’s vared to enter lines to an org-file when I write first drafts. But editing, keeping, following, creating plots, literate programming—doing everything that can be done with text—is possible in org-mode.

I have F11 bound to org-capture and F12 to org-agenda-list. F9 F9 stores links wherever I like, and I can use C-c C-l in org buffers to paste them.

w3m

When I want to search Google but don’t like the idea of running a huge browser session just to look up an answer on StackOverflow, I use this.

undo-tree

It shows the versions created by undo/redo of a buffer in a tree format. Emacs’s default undo may be cumbersome at times, but this package is terrific.

wc-mode

To count words in a file. When I forget this package, I use C-x h M-| wc as a substitute.

auctex

Once upon a time, this mode led me to migrate from LyX to LaTeX itself.

ESS

Emacs Speaks Statistics is an R frontend. I’m not using it daily, but it’s much better than the R command-line client.

Uniquify

Makes buffer names unique. If you have files with identical names, this is much better than having names like myfile.txt<1>, myfile.txt<2>, etc.

recentf-mode

A list of recent files.

smex

ido for M-x. Standard M-x selects commands by their prefix; with smex, you can filter them by any substring. This makes a difference for those with poor memory.

ahg

I use Mercurial more than Git, and ahg-mode seems like a good alternative to standard vc- commands.

projectile

It considers directories under version control as projects and defines functions like find-file, multi-occur, and recentf for them. It’s a very simple and non-intrusive way to have project management.

elpy

For Python programming, elpy provides completion and much more functionality.

ack-and-a-half

An ack mode, a hybrid version of the other two.

xgtags

A GNU Global mode for C++ code tagging.

I began using mutt after Gnus on Emacs. The reason I left Gnus behind is that it was incompatible with offlineimap and slow for IMAP use. I see no point in installing a local IMAP server when the tool that should work with Maildirs does not work. I don’t know the situation with Gnus nowadays, but I think it was a good decision to use mutt.

However, recently, in Emacs circles, I saw that people are talking about mu4e as a search-based email client. Almost all my development life is under Emacs, and I’m using org-mode for non-development more and more. Using email links with mutt and org requires ugly hacks, and I don’t like ugly hacks. So I wasn’t able to use links to email messages in org-mode with mutt. (They weren’t vital as my previous TODO scheme was based on email and I still keep it for archiving on notes in the cloud.)

I decided to give mu4e a go. It seems to work with offlineimap without fuss, and Debian packages are available. And unlike some other email packages, Emacs support is one of the important parts.

I have more than a single email account, and offlineimap reads these to different mailfolders. Since I wasn’t thinking of combining these email messages, these were residing in different Maildirs. I used mu4e for several days on only one of these. As mu updates its index by checking only the newest messages, (I think) it’s not straightforward to adapt it to different Maildirs.

Then, I saw a post that puts all Maildirs into a single directory and gives this mail root to mu as the indexing directory. Ah, nice idea. I should have thought of this.

But I was too lazy to update my offlineimap configuration. First I tried to put symlinks in a directory and supply this to mu, but it didn’t work. It doesn’t follow symlinks and as far as I can tell, there is no option to ask it to do so.

Then I moved my Maildirs to a directory and created symlinks for offlineimap and mutt in my $HOME. Symlinks are my friend. Pity for those whose OS doesn’t give an easy way to use them.