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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

#91
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On mobile it's very difficult to read because the font is too small and line width is too long, so I have to choose between squinting or scrolling back and forth and back and forth and.. (or use Firefox's reader mode). I don't mind plain text, but this site is several orders of magnitude harder to read than http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Woah really? It rendered just like motherfuckingwebsite for me on mobile.

edit: I was using readermode lol. The site does not look good at all on mobile.

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

#92
post #23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If all you think it needs are sensible defaults, try just bending said defaults. I'm somewhat curious what choices of Stallman's you think are holding it back. Feels more alive to me than it has ever felt. And that branch that is using gcc to compile elisp is a delight. I concede I expect there are choices made that could be bad; but I suspect most of the choices people think matter, don't. Which is why i highlight t…

I agree about Emacs Lisp. A language without dynamically scoped variables or without macros would be a big step backwards.

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

#93
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.

An anecdote on what you might be missing. There is nothing concrete that not using org-mode would cause you to miss out on, it is rather the possibility of being able to access one of countless workflows that have been built on top of it.

When I started to use org-mode it was because I needed to generate a gant chart and I wanted a text format. I haven't used that functionality every again. Since then I have used org-mode for a variety of things, but never all at once, always a little piece at a time. Typeset a thesis in latex? Execute analysis code in a reproducible way? Write DRY bash scripts and tangle (compile) them? Run and log the output of one-off commands on remote servers so that if you ever have to do it again you have a record of it? The list goes on and on.

Last week I was told that I needed to start keeping track of the time I spend working on different tasks. Despite keeping todo lists I have never used the org clocking functions, ye there they were there, just a C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o away. Integrated into my workflow when I needed it with all of 30 seconds of effort and two key combinations of overhead.

Emacs is useful because countless others have encountered problems the likes of which a single person only rarely dreams. Not only that but they have probably already implemented a solution that is fairly easy to find once you encounter the problem and in 80% of the cases can be used unmodified.

Yes, you and all the rest of us are missing something. It is impossible NOT to miss something and no tool can solve that for you. The question to me is whether you want to spend your time learning a tool and integrating with an ecosystem where you never have the possibility of benefiting from the things that others did not miss.

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

#94

> Network : Since I'm set up to send email, IRC, Mattermost, etc., directly from my org-mode tasks, it's easy to track where I am. I'd like to know more about this because it's something I struggle with while using org-mode. I want to have some sort of bidirectional link between org mode and Github issues for my projects; new issues should arrive in my "inbox" org file, and I'd like a simple way to update the status…

org-sync [0] is all that I could find when I went to look into this last week. It does not have all the functionality that I would want (e.g. comments should be begin_src markdown blocks), but could serve as a start for something more, and it might meet your needs as is.

0. https://github.com/arbox/org-sync

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

#95
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd venture that it's not among rank-and-file software developers, though.

I’m a software developer, that commonly talks about software development with a diverse group of software developers. I’ve never had a conversation with a software developer where they didn’t know what vim or emacs are.

The software developers I asspciate with today in the enterprise world fall in one of two camps:

1) Emacs? What is that? Looks like it came out before I was born. No thank you, I need something modern.

2) Emacs? That's still around?! I remember that from my Vax days...

Either way, few of them would countenance the idea of using Emacs to do professional software development in 2020. The vast, vast majority of developers out there use either a large feature-rich IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or Eclipse... or they use Visual Studio Code.

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

#97
post #45
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…

> snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs

[vim user] Usually I don't get baited by the holy war, but this one got me good, well played.

I don't use other editors much, but my experience with them has been that they usually do have good basic vim keybindings, but only for the default keys, and never with support for configuration; I have k-j and j-k mapped to esc, so I don't have to take my hands off the home row to leave insert/visual mode, and not being able to do that is terrible. So I don't use vim keybindings even if they are available -- it's more frustrating to put my brain in "vim mode" and then have some things missing, than to just use the default settings.

Also, it's always been weird to me how it's emacs vs vim. Vim is a text editor; emacs is an IDE and an operating system. When I'm working I'm constantly ctrl-z-ing out of vim to use other tools.

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

#98
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…

> Markdown is not consistent across the platforms that support it.

That is not true anymore. CommonMark is the formal spec everyone follows now, including most major sites out there.

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

Well, yes. Markdown is super easy to remember.

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

On top of CommonMark you can add extensions to render LaTeX just fine (like MathExchange does, for instance).

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

#99
post #45
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…

But I don't work with text. I work with semantically meaningful code.

I don't need better manipulation of meaningless context-free lexicographical symbols. I need better manipulation of context-specific, meaningful, rich objects. I spend very little time on the former, and almost all of my programming time on the latter.

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

#100
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you think it needs are sensible defaults, try just bending said defaults. I'm somewhat curious what choices of Stallman's you think are holding it back. Feels more alive to me than it has ever felt. And that branch that is using gcc to compile elisp is a delight. I concede I expect there are choices made that could be bad; but I suspect most of the choices people think matter, don't. Which is why i highlight t…

This. How is Stallman holding back the UX?

It doesn't follow Apple UI guidelines. In 1984 we learned that having one, single, mouse-driven UI paradigm for all programs, handed down to us by our superiors in Cupertino, was an objectively superior mode of interaction with a computer, saving many lives' worth of time and brainpower over the years. Yet somehow, Stallman remains so empathy-deprived as to be stubbornly unenlightened by this knowledge.
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