On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Prompted by a couple of recent threads on help-gnu-emacs
(http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/87787), I am trying to
create a minor mode for org that would implement some of the cool
features of Scrivener
(http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php).

Scrivener is a closed-source but still very cool authoring tool for
writers. After testdriving it, I find that Scrivener's interface
really makes it easy to concentrate on writing while still being aware
of the overall structure of a big project. Lots of my daughter's
friends use it for National Novel Writing Month, in which they try to
write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days; and I'm finding that more and
more of my students have switched to Scrivener from Word or
Libreoffice, over which it offers a lot of improvements (though it's
not so good atthings like footnotes).

Emacs is pretty different from Scrivener (!!), but I still think we
could implement some of its features, and that doing so would make
emacs/org-mode a *way* better environment for writers. So I've
started working on org-writers-room.el. I'm a terrible coder, and I
can't think in Lisp at all, so I think the code is pretty bad! And
right now it doesn't do much -- just sets up the basic window layout
and define one or two functions But the ambitions are described in
more detail on the github repository:

https://github.com/titaniumbones/org-writers-room

I would be really grateful for feedback from both coders and writers.
I'd especially love it if anyone had some ideas on how to implement
the missing features, or better yet, was able to write some code for
the project! As I say, I feel a little over my head when it comes to
elisp.

Thanks very much!
Matt