Taking a Look at Emacs Writing Studio

I first started looking at emacs as my writing software a number of months ago and wrote about my initial thoughts back in August of 2025. At that time I noted that I was starting with vanilla Emacs. That is the base version that has no (or at least very few) additional packages added. This minimized the complexity. Emacs is complex enough without adding more to the challenge. And, since then every post I’ve made on this blog and essentially all of the writing I’ve done since then has been on vanilla Emacs.

But that is changing.

As you’ll notice, I haven’t written much in the last couple of months. I’ve been extremely busy with a variety of activities and commitments and, frankly, writing has taken a backseat. As I started getting back into writing I realized that I’d forgotten some of the keybindings that are used in Emacs. So, to get back into the groove, I started looking for my cheatsheets ¹. In the process, I ran across the Emacs Writing Studio (EWS). Like DoomEmacs, SpaceMacs, and others, EWS is configured with specific packages to meet the needs of writers of prose rather than programmers.

My first encounter with EWS, back when I was initially exploring Emacs, didn’t leave a good impression. I was totally unfamiliar with Emacs and consequently felt as confused by it as I was by all the others. That’s why I chose to go with vanilla – I assumed that learning the basics before tackling the more complex processes that included a bunch of additional packages would be easier. And I think, for the most part, it was.

Now, though, as I jump back into writing with Emacs, I decided to give EWS another go. After all, since I was going to have to re-learn the keybindings anyway, I may as well learn some new ones that might be more helpful to me as a writer.

EWS was created by author Peter Prevos, who, among other writings, wrote a book that explains EWS, its parts and how to use it. If there is a book out there anywhere that seeks to explain DoomEmacs, or SpacEmacs, I am unaware of it. That makes EWS unique and much more approachable.

One of the most frustrating parts of learning Emacs is that even the so-called beginner guides are confusing. Most focus on how to use it in programming which makes sense given that Emacs began life as a tool for programmers. But they aren’t very helpful for the writer. Many focus on the technical aspects of installation and configuration but don’t speak to how to actually use the tool for writing. Alternately, they provide a litany of commands that are poorly explained and often listed one after the other, such that the reader has little chance of actually comprehending what the commands do². The reality is that until you learn to actually use the program, it does little good to know how to configure it: You don’t even know what you need to configure.

Thus, rather than having to dig through a lot of technical documents trying to figure out exactly what a command does, or what command to use to accomplish some task, the Prevos walks the reader/user through the various parts of EWS, explains the commands, notes differences between vanilla Emacs and EWS, and notes which packages he has added and why. Although I’ve used Emacs now for about a year, I believe I learned more about how to accomplish what I want to do in the last few days reading the book than I did while haphazardly using the program.

More than just explain EWS, Prevos also provides some guidance on how to approach writing and how EWS can contribute to that process. He speaks, for example, to the four steps of inspiration, ideation, production, and publication of your writing. I’m not going to get into each of those here. I’ll just say that the discussions exist and he did, I think, a good job of explaining them and, again, how EWS can help at each step of the process.

I am obviously still learning EWS. After all, I’ve only been using it a few days. But I am so far rather impressed and believe I’ll stick with it a while.