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Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

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Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#71

Post by iLemming »

platz wrote: post #60

Unfortunately, org-mode is only a portable format if you stick to bare-bones org-mode; if you start using any of the "power-features" unique to org-mode you're stuck. And if you restrict yourself to markdown-compatibilty, why not just write in markdown?

- Markdown is not consistent across the platforms that support it. If I wake you up at 3AM would you remember the format of links? is it parentheses first or brackets?

- Extensibility. e.g.: I got tired of manually typing description of links when I insert a link to a GitHub issue, I just wrote a tiny snippet that automatically retrieves the title of that issue.

- Literate programming. For example: I can have a python snippet that when I evaluate, results would be piped it into another snippet in SQL that retrieves data from postgress, and then I can send a http request to a remote API based on what's in DB, and then use that to build a chart. Can you do that in Markdown?

- LaTeX support. I can write some complex math formulas.

- Exporting. I can turn my Org-mode file(s) into a reveal.js presentation, into a book, or a web-blog.

- etc.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#72

Post by komali2 »

svnpenn wrote: post #37

Does anyone know of a small Emacs distribution? I would like to get into Emacs, but its hard to justify 114 MB: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 Versus Vim 18 MB: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases

I don't know of a "small" Emacs distribution.

You can have Vim in Emacs with Evil Mode. IMO Emacs bindings are terrible no matter what and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury. But on top of Vim bindings you also get an entire, programmable IDE. I guess it's kinda big but like, so are most IDEs? But you can get many features at a lighter weight than other ones.

Like yea if literally the only thing you wanna do is edit plain text and maybe at most have syntax highlighting, use plain old vim with some .vimrc setup. If you're finding yourself installing plugins to make vim be more like an IDE, at that point, just install an IDE, and no IDE handles vim bindings better than Emacs imo (and this is from extensive testing), so, there, use Emacs.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#73

Post by ORioN63 »

iLemming wrote: post #71
platz wrote: post #60

Unfortunately, org-mode is only a portable format if you stick to bare-bones org-mode; if you start using any of the "power-features" unique to org-mode you're stuck. And if you restrict yourself to markdown-compatibilty, why not just write in markdown?

- Markdown is not consistent across the platforms that support it. If I wake you up at 3AM would you remember the format of links? is it parentheses first or brackets? - Extensibility. e.g.: I got tired of manually typing description of links when I insert a link to a GitHub issue, I just wrote a tiny snippet that automatically retrieves the title of that issue. - Literate programming. For example: I can have a pytho…

> If I wake you up in 3AM would you remember the format of links? is it parentheses first or brackets?

I sure as well wouldn't. It confuses me thoroughly.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#74

Post by iLemming »

na85 wrote: post #13
lgessler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Worthy of mention, of course, is Spacemacs[1], which made Emacs approachable to me, someone who hadn't used much beyond Notepad++ and Eclipse before then. [1]: https://www.spacemacs.org/

To me, the existence of spacemacs and doom and others are an indictment of Emacs' poor out of the box experience.

You have to understand that Spacemacs, Doom, ErgoEmacs, Prelude, etc. are not products. They are collections of recipes. And bare-bone Emacs is not a product either. Emacs is a kitchen where you use Lisp to bake your own editor/IDE/frankensteinian toy. Using Spacemacs or Doom doesn't liberate you from learning Lisp and Emacs internals.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#75

Post by komali2 »

jeppesen-io wrote: post #51

I wonder what the venn diagram looks like of those who enjoy the readability of this blog and use emacs

It'd be hard to argue that it ISN'T "readable." Maybe some would think it's ugly (I don't), but objectively speaking it's ticking every "readability" box.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#76

Post by sriku »

_ofdw wrote: post #7
Rerarom wrote: post #2

I don't use emacs. I use text files to organise myself but I use notepad++ to edit them. I have tried to learn emacs a couple of times but I am really unmotivated - don't see any case where it would help me. I am afraid I'm missing something.

I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already…

Been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus the past few days and your comment reminded me of the beginning (quoting from memory, not exact words) - "this book will perhaps be understand only by those who've already had the thoughts expressed in it or similar thoughts" :)

Emacs kind of gives me that same vibe. I used it for many years to organize my research but still have a hard time remembering key strokes and such .. though i dont have a similar issue with vim whose modal interface I find rather pleasantly compositional. So I get both the sense of power and flexibility, and the chaos of it.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#77

Post by komali2 »

grzm wrote: post #68
komali2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... 4.5%. So not many but it's certainly "among."

That's those who use Emacs, not those who know what it is.

Surely the number of people who know what it is is higher than those who use it?

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#78

Post by kamaal »

thom wrote: post #45
Rerarom wrote: post #2

I don't use emacs. I use text files to organise myself but I use notepad++ to edit them. I have tried to learn emacs a couple of times but I am really unmotivated - don't see any case where it would help me. I am afraid I'm missing something.

Emacs is an enormous investment but every time I'm forced to use another editor or IDE I'm reminded how much it pays off. Fundamentally, all Emacs does is treat the whole world as text. Everything from that point forward is about giving you (or allowing you to build) tools to manipulate text in a way that is natural and powerful for you. This doesn't sound particularly earth-shaking, but it really is. Think of a lang…

Emacs is suffering from the same problem Perl is suffering offlate. Emacs was invented for a world where Text was everything. These days programming languages are designed around tooling. This is very much true for languages like Java, Python, Go. The programming tool needs to have a lot of sane builtin defaults and extensions.

The other problem is speed of typing is irrelevant if you are working with libraries all the time, which is basically what most of the programming world does. This is also true in part for vim. The whole idea of one having to press less buttons to move text around is really a solution for a problem that doesn't exist in the modern world.

Emacs is still very good in things like Keyboard macros, and M-x Occur etc. Basically text manipulation stuff. The thing is that kind of text manipulation work isn't common anymore.

Having said that, I'd be very happy if there was a good default keyboard macro system in vscode. Or in general some emacs features ported to vscode would be really neat. Some features in emacs would make great feature ideas in vscode.

Re: Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode

#80

Post by tgbugs »

platz wrote: post #60

Unfortunately, org-mode is only a portable format if you stick to bare-bones org-mode; if you start using any of the "power-features" unique to org-mode you're stuck. And if you restrict yourself to markdown-compatibilty, why not just write in markdown?

While I might have been concerned about this at one point in time, emacs and gcc are some of the most ported pieces of software in existence. That said, there have been some discussions about trying to work toward a specification for how things like org-babel should work so that other platforms can replicate the behavior inside of emacs. However, as others have stated elsewhere in the comments, once you accept emacs into your life there isn't really much incentive to spend time standardizing interfaces for things that can be handled more informally and as needed by the users. As a result those efforts need some internal incentive (like better or clearer documentation) to have development time allocated to them.
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