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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

#151

Post by sigzero »

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…

I did. Eventually you hit an emacs-ism or have to edit the emacs config files. It's just not the same no matter how they try to make it so.

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

#152

Post by Delmania »

b01t wrote: post #15

I don't use emacs; should I still invest my time in OrgMode?

If you're only using Emacs for OrgMode, my answer is an resolute, "No". You're far better finding a tool that fits in with your current workflow.

The last time we had a post about Emacs, I wrote a rather long winded response, but the summation of it was this: the value in investing in tools like Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, etc is when you can pile as much of your workflow into that tool is possible. The power of Emacs is that it is a completely customizable tool. It's primary purpose, of course, is to be a text editor, but you can configure it to be an email reader, web browsing client, note taking tool, it can run external commands, etc. It's powerful, and it can literally be the only application you have open.

The downfall with Emacs is that integrating it in certain environments, namely Windows, is not a trivial matter. I use Visual Studio, Outlook, and Lync at work. I could configure all of that to run in Emacs, but then I'd be taked with maintaining that in addition to my own work.

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

#153

Post by ruraljuror »

wtbob wrote: post #112
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…

> 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 tha…

>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).

I recently switched from Vim (still using it through plugins in some IDEs) and decided to not start with Evil mode but give Emacs keybindings a proper go. Switching the capslock key to CTRL has been crucial. This switch is a built in feature in OS X and Gnome. Downloaded a third party app in windows for my corporate pc.

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

#155

Post by sp332 »

Tomte wrote: post #37

"plus it's completely platform agnostic and future proof, because it's just text" This always irks me a bit. Being text doesn't mean that there is no file format and internal semantics to it. Sure, it's easy to hack together some transformation in Perl, but "plus it's completely platform agnostic and future proof, because it's just binary" would be correct, as well. As long as the format is documented.

You can open it and productively edit it in any plain text editor. That's why it's "just text".

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

#156

Post by groovy2shoes »

pyre wrote: post #136
groovy2shoes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I cannot use `space` as a direction/movement key in spacemacs is a non-starter for me. I'd have more luck just learning Emacs's keybindings at that point.

Really? As a long-time Vim user that switched to Spacemacs but ended up back on Vim, I've never used the space bar for movement. I'm curious do you also use backspace for movement?

No, not usually, but I use space a lot, which I didn't even realize until suddenly it pulled up a menu every time I pressed it.

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

#157

Post by groovy2shoes »

fernandotakai wrote: post #134
groovy2shoes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I cannot use `space` as a direction/movement key in spacemacs is a non-starter for me. I'd have more luck just learning Emacs's keybindings at that point.

at least for me, it feels like i have to change my whole workflow to match spacemacs, instead of being the other way around (i, being able to easily config spacemacs to match my current vim workflow). it honestly felt really backwards to use spacemacs after ~10y of vim usage. i would prefer to learn plain emacs + evil mode instead.

I'm relieved to see that it's not just me. With all the recent praise spacemacs has been getting, I felt like maybe I was taking crazy-pills or something. It's a very aesthetically pleasing setup, and a fine editor on its own, I'm sure, but it feels a little disingenuous to me the way they aggressively market to Vim users. Like you, I've been using Vim for around 10 years, so any departure in behavior has the potential to seriously cramp my workflow.

(One of the big lures of spacemacs and/or evil-mode for me is that I've always been envious of Emacs Lisp. I see things like GNUS and org-mode and SLIME... then I see Vimscript, and I hang my head in shame.)

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

#158

Post by groovy2shoes »

pzone wrote: post #146
groovy2shoes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I cannot use `space` as a direction/movement key in spacemacs is a non-starter for me. I'd have more luck just learning Emacs's keybindings at that point.

You can choose a different leader key in your .spacemacs and then bind space to whatever else you wish.

But then it's not spacemacs anymore, right? It'd be commamacs or something? ;)

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

#159

Post by justinhj »

atemerev wrote: post #108
amasad wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Emacs key layout isn't arbitrary. It was optimized for a particular keyboard the original develops used. Since then the layout has changed a little but personally the keys work well for me

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

#160

Post by disease »

malloryerik wrote: post #138
wtbob wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I actually use empty shift for parens, so comfy I almost feel guilty about it...

That sounds like something I'd like to try. Mind sharing the code from your init file that does this - assuming you are doing this in Emacs?
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