Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by shanemhansen » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

smichel17 wrote: post #89

komali2 wrote: 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

On mobile it's really easy for me to read. Don't is at a natural size and lines wrap appropriately.

[edit]

Oh I see it looks bad in Firefox on mobile. Fair enough.

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

#102

Post by abnry » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

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

For want of a margin the kingdom was lost.

I hate no margins and use the Goyo vim plugin to make my editing experience more pleasurable.

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

#103

Post by deleuze » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:11 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #99

thom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why you write Lisp in Emacs. :)

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

#104

Post by deleuze » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:12 AM UTC

bitdeveloper wrote: post #32

taeric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth underscoring that you are always missing something. You don't dodge that bullet by using emacs, just pick what you want to miss.

For example, if you do choose to use emacs, then you are missing out on time you could have spent learning vim.

IMO Emacs is better at being Vim than Vim

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

#105

Post by grimgrin » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:13 AM UTC

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…

A ton of users here will be working with markdown in their repositories (docs, README, etc), and probably have the [thing](down)

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

#106

Post by billwear » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

no offense, but i thought i would take to heart your tips about my abysmal format. falls under the category of "release early, release often." kinda like the borg, but without nanoprobes.

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

#107

Post by bitwize » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:29 AM UTC

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.

Don't worry about it too much. If your workflow works for you, go nuts with it.

But should you one day find yourself needing an informational omnitool that can be adapted to the task at hand while you work with it, you will find that there is simply no substitute for Emacs. And that's the difference between an extensible text editor and Emacs. A few lines of Emacs Lisp and some Unix plumbing can get you very far -- and you can debug it in production, dynamically updating the Lisp code as you use it.

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

#108

Post by gandalfgeek » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:33 AM UTC

Whenever there's an Emacs thread on HN, I want to post the following quote from Neal Stephenson's "In the beginning was the command line":

"It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish."

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

#109

Post by rz2k » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:46 AM UTC

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…

Is there a way to run Emacs on MacOS with an updated interface? Running Emacs in the terminal limits the functionality, but the GUI versions I've tried are garish-looking to me.

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

#110

Post by billwear » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

rz2k wrote: post #109

thom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a way to run Emacs on MacOS with an updated interface? Running Emacs in the terminal limits the functionality, but the GUI versions I've tried are garish-looking to me.

can you get to a Darwin shell? i think my wife runs emacs there from the cmd line, which is much calmer.