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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

#111

Post by atemerev »

amasad wrote: post #90
wodenokoto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the most painful position by far is all fingers on home position. If you ask a physical therapist what is the best way to sit on a chair they will say it is to switch position constantly. I'm not buying that it is opposite for a keyboard.

Moving around will help blood flow and will get you to release the static contraction (or switch muscles). That affects your forearm, wrists etc and I don't think has anything to do with your fingers. For me, keeping at the home position limits wrist contortions that I associated with my increased pain.

This is a huge mistake. Some of my friends got RSI this way.

You have to move your _arms_ when typing, not only your wrists.

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

#112

Post by wtbob »

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…

> 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.

That works in all my terminals — I suspect something's awry with your settings.

One issue is that if you use gnome-terminal under Ubuntu, I think by default it steals alt for its own menus. There's a setting to disable that, and I always selected it when I used gnome-terminal, because who uses GUI menus with a terminal? Nowadays I just use st.

Another tip is to set your caps lock key to control. This is one of those 'how did I ever live without this?' things (I actually buy keyboards where the control key is physically where caps lock is on most; it's that vital).

And if you write any Lisp or code, you might like to swap parentheses & square brackets. For me, at least, it's another one of those 'how did I ever live without this?' things. I type parens all the time, and now I don't have to hit shift. It's … wonderful.

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

#113

Post by catnaroek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
catnaroek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can draw arbitrary diagrams and pictures on my notebook. I can write using arbitrarily big or small letters. I can write fancy formulas and even make up my own notations on the fly. I can use pens of different colors, and let the colors highlight the relationships between ideas. And I don't need to worry about “synchronization”, because I always carry my notebook with me. It's not all downsides for handwritten note…

Totally. That's why in my response I avoided saying that one is better than other. It totally depends on your situation and use cases. There's tons of stuff that is about infinitely more convenient to do with paper than with computers (even tablets). Fast arbitrary drawing, fast arbitrary coloring, being able to get a full overview quicker (if you use a binder, just take out all your notes and spread them on your des…

> It totally depends on your situation and use cases.

Agreed. That's why I asked what other people's use cases are. Genuine curiosity. :-)

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

#114

Post by kiiski »

mikekchar wrote: post #6
elliotec wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people really love Org Mode, but I completely fail to see the utility of it. I even used emacs (as a text editor!) for a while, and tried Org Mode multiple times, usually ending in confusion and frustration. Not for lack of trying! From my experience, our smart phones are much better personal digital assistants than Org Mode can be, as robust as it is.

I think there are a couple of key things that people need to grasp with Org mode. First is the way it cycles visibility. You go from closed, to semi-open, to completely open, back to closed again. You can't go backwards. I know this frustrated me for a long time before I got used to it. The next biggest frustration is the way it folds empty lines. If you have a paragraph followed by an empty line, when you fold the p…

> then easily move everything around by folding it and cutting and pasting.

You could also use `org-cut-subtree` or `org-copy-subtree` for that. And of course `org-refile` (C-c C-w) is very useful, although you'll probably want to customize it to allow refiling to other places than just the first level headlines of the current file.

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

#115

Post by gexla »

OrgMode is one of the killer features of Emacs and the among my top greatest finds in the world of softwares.

Don't use an Orgmode copycat on another platform. Go straight for OrgMode on Emacs.

If you are a Vim user, EVIL mode has the best Vim keybindings I have ever used.

You don't have to leave your other dev environments for Emacs. Use Emacs only for OrgMode if you like.

My only issue with OrgMode is that it's a bit of a rabbit hole. Sometimes I clean slate my system to get rid of built up complexities, cruft, debt and other messes and I get stuck when I look at OrgMode. It's a full on project to get it to where I feel I want it to be and there is always something I an improve or change. It's never ending.

Sometimes I just want something quick which handles just text and has lots of features for doing different things with that text. In this case, I reach for Acsciidoctor. Yes, I know that OrgMode could be the same, but I need the constraints to keep me from tinkering.

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

#116

Post by wtbob »

atemerev wrote: post #62

Tried to switch to vim/Emacs repeatedly for more than 10 years, never understood the reason of cryptic commands and shortcuts, that was OK 25 years ago, but since then, keyboards got, say, _arrow keys_. Alt-F is "forward one word"? OK, can be memorized, but there is Alt-right arrow for everything else, much more intuitive. UI matters. Shortcuts and their relationships are part of the UI, and it's horrible for Emacs.…

My emacs binds the arrow keys to move by character and alt+arrow to move by word. But M-f, C-f, C-M-f (and ditto for -b, -n & -p) are a pretty powerful command language for dealing with text & code.

You're right that syntax matters: and emacs has a very nice syntax for dealing with text & code. vi is probably better, but I like emacs and am used to it, so I don't bother with spacemacs. CUA bindings are … not good.

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

#117

Post by dogweather »

I find org mode hard to use — the keystrokes seem inconsistent, and I get funky visual results. I.e., sometimes the reordering does what I expect, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes a blank line gets inserted which changes the control behavior.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

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

#118

Post by sillysaurus3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah! It looks like your URL 404's though.

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

All of it is pretty interesting, but it's sort of unreasonable to say "Here, read this tome." You can skip to the Wyvern section for the important bit. Gamedevs will be particularly interested, because the question of "How do I enable people to write games in the most flexible way?" is one of the great unsolved problems in gamedev. There's just no good way to do it. Every engine has tradeoffs, but circa 2016 these tradeoffs are anachronistic. A modern engine should be written mostly in the scripting language that it provides. Most of the codebase that would otherwise be C++ code should be script. This can be done with almost no performance penalty. So the only question left, once you decide to really do this, is how do you design it?

I think Emacs' design is the answer. Almost all of the core ideas can be incorporated into a modern game engine, provided that it's built from scratch.

Few people have the skills or the inclination to pull this off, which is why it hasn't happened yet. But I suspect anyone who does this will end up with thousands of users who love making things in it. As with Emacs.

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

#119

Post by melling »

MarcScott wrote: post #86

Most comments here seem to focus on the notes and GTD side of org-mode. For me, org-mode is my go to markup language. So much so that I now find writing in Markdown to be almost painful. A few of my favourite features are: - Tables are amazingly easy in org-mode, with spreadsheet features thrown in as well. - Code snippets can be written in their own major mode, giving me syntax highlighting, auto completion and the…

I've been using Github and org-mode to organize a lot of the notes that I collect. It's great to be able to edit notes directly on Github from a laptop, iPhone, or iPad browser.

https://github.com/melling/ios_topics

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages

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

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #118
TeMPOraL wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Yeah! It looks like your URL 404's though. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat... All of it is pretty interesting, but it's sort of unreasonable to say "Here, read this tome." You can skip to the Wyvern section for the important bit. Gamedevs will be particularly interested, because the question of "How do I enable people to write games in the most flexible way?" is one of the great unsolved…

> Yeah! It looks like your URL 404's though.

Ok. Yeah, I accidentally deleted an #\l from "html" :(.

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