Inspired by Scrivener, this experimental, unfinished minor mode hopes to eventually provide an environment in which writers can easily manage large-scale projects (like novels and dissertations) while still living in Emacs & writing in plain-text with Org.
Eventually, I hope to have a three-column interface with a collapsed outline on the left-hand side, an indirect buffer containing the current node in the main window, and editable metadata on the right. right now, though, all the mode does is set up the window structure approximately the way I want it and remap C-c C-x b to a new function that forces all indirect buffers to display in the main, center window.
This is broken software – you shouldn’t expect it to do what it’s supposed to do yet - -but if you want to help develop it please download it and hack away! My elisp skills aren’t relaly up to the task. Thank you!
- Emacs 24
- a recent org-mode
- desktop-mode
Put org-writers-room.el somewhere in your load-path and load it.
For now, it’s assumed that each project lives in just one single file, that might be structured e.g.:
- Novel
- Ch1: Dark & Stormy Night
- Dave watches rain in nursery
- Stan approaches from outside
- The confrontation
- Ch2: Bright & Shiny Day
- Ch3: A Glorious Dawn
- Ch4: A chilling dusk
- Ch5: Midnight
- Ch1: Dark & Stormy Night
- Notes
- Characters
- Dave
- Joanne
- Thoughts on Mood
- Pathetic Fallacies
- why is Dave sad?
- Characters
Use regular org-mode commands to move bits of the structure around in the guide. Note: [TAB] has been rebound to a custom function that will show ONLY HEADLINES in the guide. When you actually want to write, press [RETURN] and the appropriate subtree will appear in the main window, while the metadata will be shown in a third window. Each new subheading will be given a set of new properties (default: Synopsis, Rule in Book, Characters – these are probably bad defaults and can be changed with a defcustom, org-writers-room-properties). These properties can be searched using normal org search functions – C-c / p or C-c / m – but I would like to write something better later.
Most of the features I want are not yet implemented! Here are some plans/aspirations I have for this mode:
change the visibility cycling in the “guide” buffer so that it’s impossible to make node content visible there cycling should just affect the number of sub-headings visible in a given node.
consider suppressing display of headline tags in the guide, to make view cleaner. Or just shorten headline text so they never wrap.
Right now this is sort of implemented, but the properties are still a pain to edit, even in the metadata window.
- synopsis
- characters
- umm, I thought there would be more but I can’t think of them. If it were an academic monograph instead of a novel, you might have quite a number of properties to keep track of.
Currently it’s just a view. Would be nice to have better editing and other keybindings; would also be nice to use it to show metadata of multiple headlines when searches take place.
searching right now is awful
In general, the code right now is quite fragile and I think of pretty poor quality. It should be made, well, better.
Please, please, please take this code and improve it. If you’re interested in contributing, please fork & push or consider asking for commit access. I’m not a coder! I just want to be able to use org-mode for everything.