But for other kinds of documents word processors are certainly not the best tool for the job: long documents, documents that require careful organization, fiction and other long works of text, and for that matter, documents that require the ultimate in compatibility between computers, systems, and time. For this last purpose, only pure text is guaranteed to transfer successfully-it's the lowest common denominator. Macintosh users call it "simple text" and edit it using the program by the same name. Windows users call it "plain text" and edit it using Notepad. There are other programs available of course. But because so much configuration on those systems require text files Unix and Linux users are better acquainted with text files in general, and several extremely powerful text editors exist Emacs is one of them, and in my opinion, a wonderful solution for writers.
If what you write is text, be it fiction, poems, massive emails, or the like, you may be well served by a text editor over a word processor. Besides the advantages listed above, and particularly the fact that you are guaranteed the software to read your file will exist in the future, there are many other reasons to use text editors instead of word processor. First of all, word processors distract you with usually unnecessary options. Because your editor is going to do the formatting, you will probably be requested to send in a document devoid of any mark up (bold, italics, etc.). And word processors can be distracting in their incessant highlighting of misspelled words that beg to be corrected before moving on - thus interrupting your train of thought. Word processors make you focus too much on the document as a document and distract you from what you should be doing, writing - being creative - producing text. Why worry about page breaks during the writing process? You should be dealing with that at the end, or not at all. In sum, text editors allow you to concentrate on writing, not formatting.1
Because text is so important to Unix, a tremendous number of powerful text editors are available to you, nearly always without charge. This document describes how to use one of them - emacs - to write. Windows and Macintosh users, don't despair - versions of emacs exist for your platforms as well. Because many use emacs for developing software - computer code - the focus of this document is rather unique. But emacs is a powerful and extremely useful way to deal with text directly. Give it a try to write your next book, report, or thesis. You may find it a better tool and more worthwhile ally than you expect.