Emacs Writing Machine

Summary

Home | About | Archive Emacs Writing Machine Posted on Jul 25, 2026 by Chung-hong Chan I like writing. Really. However, I have problem finishing my drafts. As you might be able to read in my OKRs, I mentioned multiple times that I have quite a lot of blog drafts that I haven’t completed. I don’t want to blame anyone and it’s completely my fault: I have problem focusing on a task. I have an attention problem. In the past, I could blame things like Twitter for distracting me from getting shit done. But now, I don’t use any of these social media services anymore. I am running out of excuses. I wanted to change my writing routine and would like to see if it would make a difference. Then, I watched a video by Veronica (of Veronica Explains) on her (new) writing setup. She reused an old laptop and made it a dedicated writing machine, or “writerdeck.” In that writing machine, she only used command-line only Debian and neovim (her preferred text editor). Her blog post has details on her machine. I find the idea very interesting and wanted to give it a try. First, I needed a spare laptop. In fact, over the years my wife and I have accumulated a few unused but still functional laptops. I decided to take my wife’s previous ThinkPad T440 with Intel i5 and 8G of RAM. It is a perfectly capable machine, only it is unbelievably slow for my wife’s relatively simple tasks such as watching YouTube. Modern web browsers are memory hog. And this is exactly the category of software a dedicated writing machine doesn’t need. I followed Veronica’s blog post and installed Debian without any desktop environment and kmscon. My first diversion from Veronica is that I use emacs. I just quickly pulled my emacs configuration on my main machine from Git and removed all configurations about programming. emacs launches extremely fast and should be so. You know, people bought 386 back in the late 80s to 90s to do similar things: launching DOS and write with Word Perfect or Word Star. There is no way th...