Using Atom for academic writing

[manngo]

I have other software for writing in Markdown (I use MacDown), but I turned to Atom when I started using AsciiDoc, which is a more powerful language.

I had a very bad experience with GitBook which was supposed to support AsciiDoc, but all I did was waste my money and time on the effort. I then found that Atom has an Asciidoc preview package, and that made things much better.

[Aerijo]

Is there a way to group my packages so that I can easily disable all of my coding packages when I’m writing, and vice-versa? Thanks!

I’m a bit late, but Atom has “activation-hooks”, which delay loading of packages until they are actually used, or their declared language is used. It’s totally up to the package developer to add these, but it means that the issue isn’t quite as important as you might first believe.

For example, if you have a bunch of Haskell IDE packages (for whatever reason), they’ll only load if you open a Haskell file. If you never open that kind of file, those packages will never load. Similarly, the latex package will only load when you first open a .tex file, or run one of it’s commands.

I don’t know exactly what impact this has on load times, but it’s probably relatively minor.

[benmarwick]

For on-the-fly checking of professional and scholarly writing there is also an atom linter, linter-retextjs that uses the retext natural language processor and many of its plugins

This package provides these checkers:

• cliches: Checks phrases for cliches
• equality: checks for possible insensitive, inconsiderate language
• intensify: check for weak and mitigating wording
• profanities: check for profane and vulgar wording
• passive: check for passive voice
• repeated words: check for repeated words
• simplify: check phrases for simpler alternatives
• contractions: check apostrophe use in contractions
• usage: warn about incorrect English usage
• indefinite article: check if indefinite articles (a, an) are used correctly
• overuse: check words for overuse
• diacritics: check for proper use of diacritics

This package is like a super-set that includes linter-alex, write-good, linter-just-say-no, and others

I’ve found it easy to propose additions to the retext checkers because they are all developed in the open on GitHub and have detailed instructions for contributors.

[rriemann]

That’s awesome! Can you tell us how the configuration works?

I find no documentation.

In lack of enabled Github issues, I ask here: would it be feasible to allow in the configuration the disabling of some retext plugins per GUI?

I might consider to convert my EU clear writing guidelines project from http://proselint.com/ to retext.

[benmarwick]

Thanks! Yes those config options are taken directly from the alex-linter pkg, and are documented for that pkg here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/alex#alexignore I haven’t used them yet myself.

Yes, that is a great question about toggling the retext plugins in the GUI, I agree that would be very handy! I need to study some other pkgs that have these kind of settings to see how it might be possible (currently I have no idea). If you have any suggestions about good examples I’d be most grateful to know.

Also, I’ve move the GitHub repo for retextjs so issues can be opened there, I’ve opened this just now: https://github.com/benmarwick/linter-retextjs/issues/1

[tomasland]

Hi there. Interesting post. Thanks for the useful information.

[joebtay]

Hi there very much a newbie trying to organise 330 pages of literature search and live the visuals and multiscreen element. Unable to track that a package that allows me to tag paragraphs with @tag like in folding text. Ie clicking on an @tag gives you the paragraphs that contain it- any ideas?

[Olij]

Great topic !

I am a regular user of tools such as Zettlr to take Markdown notes with bibliographic references.

I have recently started using Atom and, for me, the most useful package is Pandoc/PDF.