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Best apps for writers

writersdigest.com

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Re: Best apps for writers

#31

Post by pasabagi »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #3

Emacs is seriously the best 'app' for anyone working with text, including writers. And if its (default) looks put you off, have a look at extensions (and Emacs is designed to be extended) like the Poet theme: https://github.com/kunalb/poet

I had exactly the same thought, except with vim. I think the real advantage vim and emacs have is, they're still going to be maintained in 20 years time, and you won't end up having to do all your work on a machine that's two decades old, or write on something new and uncomfortable every half-decade.

Re: Best apps for writers

#34

Post by dotancohen »

zokier wrote: post #28
Theodores wrote: post #20

Serious suggestion - semantic HTML5 with the tags in a decent IDE. You may laugh but I am serious. Language has moved on and it has been moving on for as long as there has been recorded history. With HTML5 you get the extra markup for 'section', 'article', 'aside' and there are other semantic elements that already exist - 'em' is not the same as 'i', it infers emphasis rather than making the letters italic. See the e…

Well you can't just leave us hanging, what is a good ide for authoring good semantic html5?

Emacs.

I say that seriously, as a VIM user.

Re: Best apps for writers

#36

Post by AlbertoGP »

byproxy wrote: post #24
Theodores wrote: post #20

Serious suggestion - semantic HTML5 with the tags in a decent IDE. You may laugh but I am serious. Language has moved on and it has been moving on for as long as there has been recorded history. With HTML5 you get the extra markup for 'section', 'article', 'aside' and there are other semantic elements that already exist - 'em' is not the same as 'i', it infers emphasis rather than making the letters italic. See the e…

I like this idea, but maybe there should be (or maybe there is) a writing-specific subset of XML, like there is with music. The HTML elements come close to encompassing a lot of functionality, but I think there ought to be an expanded set of tags for doing ... stranger? .. things. For example, how would you render "House of Leaves" in HTML? I'm thinking of modern music composition and how it's really pushed music not…

The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format is a writing-specific XML vocabulary.

https://teibyexample.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative

The whole set is enormous as it can encode all kinds of modern and ancient forms of literature with many kinds of annotations, even parallel versions of the same text as often happens with old works for which there is no known “original”. You can encode scribal variations etc.

There have been several attempts to create a simplified subset that would be useful for what we could call a normal modern book, but they haven’t got very far because it is still cumbersome and the tooling needed to work effectively with it is not freely available. I’m working on such tooling in my spare time, more focused on DocBook as the vast majority of what I write is technical documentation.

The simplified subset from TEI themselves is called TEI Lite: https://tei-c.org/guidelines/customization/lite/

If TEI sounds interesting to you, there is an application called TEI Publisher, Free Software under the GPLv3, that you might use: https://teipublisher.com/

Actually, looking at it again it now looks quite good. I’ll give it a try later.

Edit 24 minutes later: tried to install TEI Publisher, it works on top of the eXist XML DB, and after installing it, starting it gives me an “Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException”. Ah well...

Re: Best apps for writers

#37

Post by dustfinger »

ashton314 wrote: post #16
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #3

Emacs is seriously the best 'app' for anyone working with text, including writers. And if its (default) looks put you off, have a look at extensions (and Emacs is designed to be extended) like the Poet theme: https://github.com/kunalb/poet

Amen to that. I read a blog post somewhere (sorry, lost the reference) about a writer (non-programmer, mind you) who switched to Emacs for Org-Mode. Another extension that's great for writing/note taking is Deft [1]. Give it a directory (optional recursing) of .md, .txt, .org, etc. files, and it will let you filter through them instantly. I've been using this for a few years now and it's still my primary digital note…

If you are using emacs org-mode, might I also suggest org-brain [1] for concept mapping, org-capture [2] for collecting notes or memes and org-publish [3] to export to other formats. If you are planning on blogging using the hugo static site generator then I recommend ox-hugo [4].

[1] https://kungsgeten.github.io/org-brain.html

[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html

[3] https://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html

[4] https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/

Re: Best apps for writers

#38

Post by fbelzile »

Scarbutt wrote: post #6
fbelzile wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created the 5th app in this list (Cold Turkey Blocker). I'm actually surprised they didn't mention my other app called Cold Turkey Writer. It runs full-screen and doesn't let user out of the program until a goal (word count or timer) is reached. I have lots of writers that swear by it: https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/

I used your blocker last week, changing the system clock time (from time and date preferences) made your app useless (doesn't block anymore), so went back to editing /etc/hosts again. If circumventing the block is easier than editing a hosts file I don't see the point. For many, I don't think changing the clock time is an uncommon thing to think about if the desire to procrastinate arises again.

Cold Turkey uses NTP to get time from the Internet and falls back to the OS time if that fails. You might just need to add a firewall exception somewhere. Also, you can block the system settings so you can't change the time: C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel\SystemSettings.exe

Re: Best apps for writers

#39

Post by bjoli »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #3

Emacs is seriously the best 'app' for anyone working with text, including writers. And if its (default) looks put you off, have a look at extensions (and Emacs is designed to be extended) like the Poet theme: https://github.com/kunalb/poet

This talk called "Emacs for writers" is amazing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU

Re: Best apps for writers

#40

Post by scarcely »

Scarbutt wrote: post #6
fbelzile wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created the 5th app in this list (Cold Turkey Blocker). I'm actually surprised they didn't mention my other app called Cold Turkey Writer. It runs full-screen and doesn't let user out of the program until a goal (word count or timer) is reached. I have lots of writers that swear by it: https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/

I used your blocker last week, changing the system clock time (from time and date preferences) made your app useless (doesn't block anymore), so went back to editing /etc/hosts again. If circumventing the block is easier than editing a hosts file I don't see the point. For many, I don't think changing the clock time is an uncommon thing to think about if the desire to procrastinate arises again.

You could look into this app called Sprintwork. I set the profile to be fixed for thirty days and so far I've yet to find a way to circumvent it.

If on iOS, the parental restrictions are awesome.

If on Android, restrictions are worthless so I usually use a blocker, set the phone to unlock by fingerprint and in addition have a system password (because of the possibility of logging in via "safe mode" which I so regret having discovered) written down on a piece of paper and hid inside my neighborhood Starbuck's sofa.

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