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Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

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Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#101

Post by mrkgnao »

pqhwan wrote: post #50

I learned VI before Emacs, and by the time I heard about Org Mode, I had developed a way of using Vim similarly; in a nutshell, I write in a clang file (usually named control.c), and (mis)use syntax highlighting on things like switch statement, comments, TODOs and code folding to add structure (screenshot: http://imgur.com/kqrEahz ). I did most of my coding in C in college, got into the habit of writing pseudocode in…

What is your vim setup? The fonts and colors and everything look gorgeous; I'd love to have something like that.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#102

Post by _lbaq »

sz4kerto wrote: post #75
_lbaq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took my OneNote stuff into OrgMode because I think there is a higher risk of OneNote being an unreadable format in the future and/or the service being turned off.

OneNote stores the notebooks in simple files -- sharing is done through Onedrive. It's very-very unlikely that suddenly and without warning Microsoft 1) encodes your notebooks in some unreadable format 2) stops the service.

Is it worth the hassle and uncertainty ? I guess that depends on what you store in the files, my UTF-8 encoded text files read by org-mode, is easily readable and information can be extracted without (almost) any effort.

Since I store my diary, ideas, manuscripts, cv's, contacts, meeting notes and a myriad of other things, I cant simply trust anything else with the data.

I've seen many cases with distraught persons realizing all their treasured data is locked into a obsolete format on a obsolete machine that just crashed.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#103

Post by vim-guru »

I've been using Org-mode and babel for about a month; and I'm sold! I think the way I was writing software before outlines and the literate nature of Org-mode was just wrong. The software you write when you do literate programming can be read like a book, following the data-flow chronologically. That's a really attractive trait if you are to share your code with others and of course your future self.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#104

Post by sillysaurus3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #95
midgetjones wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for anyone that is more open-minded, yet worried about the learning curve of switching from vim to emacs: http://spacemacs.org/

Also worth checking out for anyone who (like me) thinks vim has much better keybinding philosophy than Emacs, and that switching evil-mode makes Emacs a perfect working environment.

Any vim user, try this:

1. brew install emacs, apt-get install emacs, or pkg add emacs

2. vim ~/.emacs

3. paste the following, verbatim. Don't bother reading it:

  (require 'package) ;; You might already have this line
  (add-to-list 'package-archives
               '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
  (when (
4. :wq

5. Open emacs

6. Press escape, then "x", then enter. Now type package-install and press enter.

7. Type evil-mode and press enter.

8. Click the "Buffers" menu at the top of the screen, then click "scratch"

Now pretend like you're using Vim. It's almost identical. It's literally like using Vim. You can shift-V = to indent code, gg shift-V gG to select the whole buffer (or, y'know, command-A), etc.

There were only two minor differences that annoyed me: ctrl-u no longer scrolls up, and yanking text copies to the global system clipboard. (v"+y is supposed to do that, not yanking!)

To fix the scrolling issue, press escape then x and type "customize". In the search field, type "evil". You'll get a list of fancy customizations. One of them is C-u for scrolling; enable it, then click "apply and save" at the top.

That should get you started. There are a bunch of fun things to do... Try escape, x, list-packages. You don't even need to know a single keybinding. You'll just get a list of packages with hyperlinks you can click on, which pops up a little info blob that usually has a link to a github repo for the package.

If you try to stick with emacs, the next week or so will be "interesting." You an use escape x apropos to find info about escape x commands. (These are called "M-x" in emacs parlance. And if you use the GUI version of emacs, you can use alt-x instead of pressing escape then x. It's much easier, but doesn't seem to work in the terminal.)

Personally, I stuck with it in order to learn how emacs worked: how you can design a program to be so extensible, and how extensible it truly was. Gamedevs in particular might be interested in going through this gauntlet; the way that emacs lisp exposes functionality will inform the design of the next engine you write. Check out Yegge's post about the universal design pattern as applied to gamedev.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#105

Post by MandieD »

Tomte wrote: post #28
mmel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used orgmode for a while before importing them all into Microsoft OneNote, haven't looked back

OneNote is a bit idiosyncratic and I've had problems using it "right" whenever I tried it. But then I finally read some blog posts and documentation and it clicked. I'm not looking back, either. Even though I'm Emacs-inclined (though not living in Emacs), orgmode is too unwieldy and complicated for me, and the "killer missing feature" is quick entry and editing on my mobile phone. OneNote does that very, very well.

Mind sharing the links or names of what posts or docs helped you the most with OneNote?

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#106

Post by atemerev »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #98
atemerev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel uncomfortable when reaching for the arrow keys with my right hand. But I _do_ feel very uncomfortable when I press wrong navigation key in Vim (was it h or j? My fingers don't _feel_ it), and it's really uncomfortable reaching for Ctrl for anything in Emacs, especially Ctrl-B — now _this_ is RSI-prone).

Remap CTRL to CAPS LOCK. It's a pretty standard thing in Emacs world. Also, learning keybindings is a matter of your state of mind. Or rather, of your attitude. You didn't start knowing how to use arrows, you learned it at some point in your life. It took time then too. Like 'amasad wrote, treat it as a new controls for a videogame. Somehow people don't have problems with learning those.

Some things are inherently easy to learn and to use, because they map to innate categories (e.g. direction and size). And some things are arbitrary and require memorization.

And don't get me started on videogames. When I was still playing them, I was constantly remapping keys.

One can say: "OK then, it's Emacs, you can remap the keys any way you want". And believe me, I tried. And struggled with keymapping conflicts here and there (including Ergoemacs).

I adore the idea of absolute configurability. I like how Emacs is built and what amount of extensions is available. I just can't use it, no matter how I tried.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth checking out for anyone who (like me) thinks vim has much better keybinding philosophy than Emacs, and that switching evil-mode makes Emacs a perfect working environment.

Any vim user, try this: 1. brew install emacs, apt-get install emacs, or pkg add emacs 2. vim ~/.emacs 3. paste the following, verbatim. Don't bother reading it: (require 'package) ;; You might already have this line (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/")) (when ( 4. :wq 5. Open emacs 6. Press escape, then "x", then enter. Now type package-install and press enter. 7. Type evil-mode…

> Check out Yegge's post about the universal design pattern as applied to gamedev.

You mean this one?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat...

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#108

Post by atemerev »

amasad wrote: post #93
atemerev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel uncomfortable when reaching for the arrow keys with my right hand. But I _do_ feel very uncomfortable when I press wrong navigation key in Vim (was it h or j? My fingers don't _feel_ it), and it's really uncomfortable reaching for Ctrl for anything in Emacs, especially Ctrl-B — now _this_ is RSI-prone).

True, emacs default key binding is also RSI-prone. I suggested going with vim's key binding (evil-mode, spcemacs) for newcomers. But I don't buy the argument that they're so hard to learn, consider it a new video game controller.

Video game _controllers_ are designed to be intuitive, with many discarded attempts, lots of A/B testing and ergonomic tests. One can't say it about Emacs default layout, it is pretty much arbitrary (unlike videogame controllers).

There are some games requiring memorizing controls on keyboard, like flight sims. For me, those were impossible to play, until I bought flight stick hardware, which is designed much better.

And I have quite good working memory; I remember all my credit card numbers, more than 100 phone numbers, etc. — which allows me to be a decent software engineer. But I can't recognize faces, and I have problems with some tactile combinations (not all; I can blind type). But vim and Emacs are really hard to me for some reason.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#109

Post by TeMPOraL »

atemerev wrote: post #106
TeMPOraL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remap CTRL to CAPS LOCK. It's a pretty standard thing in Emacs world. Also, learning keybindings is a matter of your state of mind. Or rather, of your attitude. You didn't start knowing how to use arrows, you learned it at some point in your life. It took time then too. Like 'amasad wrote, treat it as a new controls for a videogame. Somehow people don't have problems with learning those.

Some things are inherently easy to learn and to use, because they map to innate categories (e.g. direction and size). And some things are arbitrary and require memorization. And don't get me started on videogames. When I was still playing them, I was constantly remapping keys. One can say: "OK then, it's Emacs, you can remap the keys any way you want". And believe me, I tried. And struggled with keymapping conflicts…

Well, I have much more problems with Vim bindings (hjkl) than with Emacs, which map to obvious concepts - #\p for "previous", #\n for "next", #\f for "forward", #\b for "backward", etc. Still, I found out that 5 to 10 minutes of focused training is enough to overcome any set of keybindings. Seriously, try that - 5 minutes, to the clock. Most people never spend more than a minute or two on a new thing, and then give up and complain it's too difficult.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#110

Post by atemerev »

dragandj wrote: post #89
atemerev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel uncomfortable when reaching for the arrow keys with my right hand. But I _do_ feel very uncomfortable when I press wrong navigation key in Vim (was it h or j? My fingers don't _feel_ it), and it's really uncomfortable reaching for Ctrl for anything in Emacs, especially Ctrl-B — now _this_ is RSI-prone).

That's why you could remap ctrl and put it just next to SPACE. Speaking of that, I also remapped Shift to space, and now I use space for both shift and space (sounds crazy, but it is ergonomically perfect!).

Sorry, on Macs the Cmd key (the one next to space bar) is pretty busy with other mappings.

I remapped Ctrl to Caps Lock, which is somewhat better. But Ctrl-B is still quite painful.

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