Emacs Writing Studio: an Org mode writing setup shipped with its own book

A configuration and a book that argue for the same workflow

Emacs Writing Studio, abbreviated EWS, is described as a configuration and comprehensive manual for writers seeking an integrated research, writing and publication tool. The repository holds two things: the Emacs configuration itself, and the Org mode source files for the book that explains it.

That pairing is the point. A configuration file is easy to copy and hard to understand, and a book about writing is easy to read and hard to apply. Here the manual was written and produced with the configuration, so the same workflow is described in prose and implemented in code, and the notes say the ideas behind it are drawn from how the author actually works.

The project is not free of a commercial dimension. The author asks for support by buying the e-book or paperback through a book retailer, PayHip or LeanPub. The counterweight is that the Org mode source code of the book is freely available in the documents folder, so the project states you can roll your own using the Org export functionality and the associated external software. The website at lucidmanager.org is described as the forerunner of the book and explains the configuration, and there is a YouTube playlist demonstrating it.

What the repository is not is a package. The README states plainly that it is not a maintained Emacs package, that it provides a starting point to develop a configuration for beginning Emacs users, that more advanced users can copy ideas, and that the code will only be updated when bugs appear because of future changes in packages or Emacs itself. That sentence sets expectations better than any feature list would.

Six principles, including no programming modes and no configuration code

The configuration follows a stated set of principles, and the list is more revealing than a feature enumeration would be.

The first is to stay as close as humanly bearable to vanilla GNU Emacs, and the second is to leverage functionality of the latest Emacs version. Those two together mean the setup deliberately avoids compensating for a missing built-in with a package, which is the opposite of what many Emacs configurations do.

Standard keyboard shortcuts are the third principle, which matters because a configuration that rebinds keys creates friction for every muscle memory you have from other tools. The fourth is no configuration for writing code, that is, no prog-mode, and it is stated as a positive decision rather than a limitation: this is a setup for prose, and the author does not want it shadowing a programming environment.

The fifth principle is that the configuration is centred around Org mode. The sixth is the most unusual: no-code configuration, a customisation tool instead of writing Emacs Lisp. So the setup is intended to be adjusted through a graphical or menu-driven customisation surface rather than by editing Lisp, which makes it accessible to people who do not want to read Elisp to change a keybinding.

Taken together, the principles describe a configuration that is deliberately conservative, built on one package, and designed for a specific kind of user. The README invites issues for suggestions on additional packages useful to authors and for typos in the text, which tells you what kind of contribution the maintainer wants to receive.

Installation is two files in your configuration directory

The installation path is deliberately minimal. The init.el file contains the basic configuration and ews.el defines a series of convenience functions, and you download both from the repository and save them in the Emacs configuration folder. The location depends on your operating system and Emacs version, and the way to find it is to type C-h v user-emacs-directory= and read the location in the popup help buffer.

EWS then activates and installs the required packages after you evaluate the restart-emacs function, or the next time you start Emacs. So the package installation is handled by the configuration rather than by a separate step, which fits the no-code principle of the project.

For experienced Emacs users there is a way to try the configuration without overwriting what you already have, which is the honest way to evaluate a configuration that replaces your init file. The two commands are:

  git clone https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio
  emacs --init-directory emacs-writing-studio

The point of that path is that it points Emacs at a different init directory for one session, so the existing configuration is untouched and you can compare the two setups in place. Anyone with a carefully built init file should use this rather than the file-copy route, and should keep a copy of their current configuration either way, since EWS is explicitly going to install packages on top of whatever it finds.

The repository layout is small and readable: init.el and ews.el at the root, a documents/ directory holding the Org sources of the book and its images, a logo/ directory, a readme.org file, and the cover artwork for the book in several formats at the top level.

The four phase workflow runs from inspiration to publication

The configuration, the website and the book follow the same workflow, which the README describes as four phases plus one constant.

Inspiration covers reading, listening to and watching media such as e-books or lectures, and the note is that Emacs can maintain and consume your bibliography or media collection. Ideation is where you reflect on the ideas of others and develop your own, and the role Emacs plays there is a note-taking system. Production is the actual writing phase, and here the project focuses on the capabilities of the Org mode package for writing projects. Publication is the last phase, in which Org mode files are converted to the final product in ePub, PDF or office format.

Administration is described as not a phase of the process as such but nevertheless essential, and it covers managing files and projects. That is a small and honest admission that most of the friction in a writing system comes from where things live rather than from the writing itself.

The phase structure is also a way of organising dependencies, because the external software the configuration leans on is listed by phase. For inspiration you need gs or mutool to view PDF files, pdftotext to convert PDF to text with search enabled, soffice to view and create office documents, zip to unpack ePub documents, ddjvu to view DjVu files, curl to read RSS feeds, and a set of audio and video players. Ideation needs grep or ripgrep for searching inside files. Production needs hunspell for spellcheck with a dictionary, dvipng to preview mathematical notation as part of LaTeX, and git for version control. Publication needs convert or gm to convert image files, latex from TeXLive, MacTeX or MikTeX to preview LaTeX and export Org to PDF, and zip to create ePub and office documents.

Several of those are alternatives for each other, so you only need one, which the README says explicitly. And when EWS starts and some of the listed software is missing, the Messages buffer lists it, while the core functionality of Emacs still works fine without it. The missing tools break specialised tasks, not the whole setup.

Compiling the book needs Graphviz on top of the EWS configuration

The documents/ directory is not a supplement, it is the second half of the project. The source files are optimised for export to PDF using LaTeX and to ePub, and to compile the book you need the EWS configuration, the supporting applications listed for the phases, and Graphviz, which draws some of the diagrams in the book.

The instruction is to run the Org export function from inside the 00-emacs-writing-studio.org file. So the build of the book is itself an Org export, which is a neat demonstration of the point the book is making. The naming convention with a numeric prefix suggests the files are ordered so the export processes them in sequence, and running export from the first file is what starts that sequence.

The project is licensed under GPL v3.0 with a LICENSE file at the root, and the configuration files are the licensed artefact alongside the book sources. That licence matters more here than for a typical app, because the entire value of the project is that people copy pieces of it into their own setup, and a copyleft licence covers derivative configurations as well as the original.

The last push was on 2026-05-24, and the repository is not archived, but the README's own maintenance statement is the governing fact here: this is not a maintained package, and updates happen only when upstream changes break something. A reader planning to base a long-running setup on it should treat it as a snapshot and check that the packages it pulls still install.

Editorial conclusion

Emacs Writing Studio is worth taking seriously if you publish regularly and want one toolchain from bibliography to ePub, because the configuration and the manual explain the same workflow and the Org sources of the book are included so you can adapt them. It is the wrong tool if you want a supported package with a maintainer behind it, because the project says outright that it is not maintained and only changes when upstream packages or Emacs break it, and it is the wrong tool if you want a code-writing environment, since programming modes are explicitly excluded. Before you adopt the configuration, verify three things yourself: that the package versions it installs still work with the Emacs version you run, that the supporting command line tools it expects are present on your machine, and that the GPL v3.0 licence suits your situation if you redistribute any part of it, since the configuration itself is copyleft.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. pprevos/emacs-writing-studio on GitHub
4. Project website
5. README