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

stormrider.io

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

#131

Post by thecupisblue »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #126
iLemming wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars What makes Emacs genuinely great? Not that it was built a long time ago and withstood the test of time. Not the fact that it is absolutely free to use, distribute and extend. Not that it doesn't have tons of bugs (it does), or has superb support for every known programming language (it does not). To understa…

> Learning and understanding Lisp expands your umwelt. You will start seeing things differently. Lisp made me weird. Every day I say something like "Rabbits are machines for turning grass into rabbits" and my wife just rolls her eyes.

Oh jesus. I don't Lisp but I guess I should start now since I'm in that mindset already.

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

#132

Post by _mlxl »

I once wrote a long comment on Hacker News about how I wasted 2 years on trying to learn emacs. I wish I could go back and stop anyone from ever reading it in case I put someone off from trying it.

I was in a weird place at the time and scapegoated emacs for my lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong it is possible to spend a lot of time fiddling with your config files for emacs.

I picked emacs up again after I quit my last job (quitting made me almost immediately a happier person). I decided to only use packages that would help me to write code, and EVIL mode. So lsp-mode (and the associated lsp-servers), flycheck for syntax highlighting, DAP for debugging & breakpointing code, magit for git and Projectile for project management.

I read the documentation thoroughly for each plugin to actually see what it was doing, and many times jumped directly into the source code of the plugin to see how it was moving under the hood. I started using org-mode to document my journey into each plugin and grew really fond of the ability to collapse points under headers and freely move the headers about in the file with a few keystrokes.

I loved that I could create my own IDE using emacs-lisp. I have a completely minimal interface with just the mode-line and the pane of text. No gaudy menus, no enormous always present side panel, no top bar. Just me and the text. When I start the program it loads an empty window. There are no distractions in emacs, and no incentive to ever add them. And if Stallman ever decided to sell out, I have a fork of the code at its current version which I could use forever.

I jump between backend and front end code in emacs and due to the hooks and mode setup, it always knows the right things to turn on to make it easier to work on that specific chunk of text.

Emacs is an alien technology. It has so much power I didn't know what to do with it at the start and that scared me. I dedicated a bit of my life to it, and now I am confident knowing that if I pick up a new language in the future I will be writing it in emacs.

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

#133

Post by ramraj07 »

svnpenn wrote: post #52
dmd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justify in terms of what, exactly? At current disk prices, 114 megabytes costs less than a third of a US penny. Even at minimum wage, you'd make that in under a second.

surely someone of your pedigree can understand, not everything is about money. Why should I use something 6 times larger? Without a benefit thats just software bloat from where I sit. and GNU is known for this, from glibc on up.

Unless you are actually running out of space, why is that even a criteria? Unless two programs are exactly feature-paired, why would you even think about how much storage they take up? The only explanation is that your work has made you think about space taken by programs for legitimate reasons and you are unable to think outside that mindset - when the cheapest phones ship with 50-100x more space than that, when a single minute of video from a regular persons phone could take up this much space, when the regular user consumes 10x that bandwidth every day in the internet? Who cares if it's 100 MB?

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

#134

Post by theodcr »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #112

there is an org mode for vim, how good is it? https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode (also i never understood why collapsible nested lists make such a big difference)

Not that great in my experience, good enough to read and navigate through org files, but lacks many features and has performance issues. vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki is probably the best note-taking plugin for vim.

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

#135

Post by Lammy »

iLemming wrote: post #115
gandalfgeek wrote: post #108

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 devo…

> emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars What makes Emacs genuinely great? Not that it was built a long time ago and withstood the test of time. Not the fact that it is absolutely free to use, distribute and extend. Not that it doesn't have tons of bugs (it does), or has superb support for every known programming language (it does not). To understa…

Thank you for introducing me to the term "umwelt". Over the past few years I've come to believe there's no such thing as objective reality at all—that it just feels that way when enough subjective viewers agree about what is true—and it's amazing to have a word for this for the first time.

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

#136

Post by nxpnsv »

andreareina wrote: post #121
iLemming wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars What makes Emacs genuinely great? Not that it was built a long time ago and withstood the test of time. Not the fact that it is absolutely free to use, distribute and extend. Not that it doesn't have tons of bugs (it does), or has superb support for every known programming language (it does not). To understa…

" Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors": https://chrisdone.com/posts/emacs-users-are-like-igor/

Emacth?

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

#137

Post by burntoutfire »

_mlxl wrote: post #132

I once wrote a long comment on Hacker News about how I wasted 2 years on trying to learn emacs. I wish I could go back and stop anyone from ever reading it in case I put someone off from trying it. I was in a weird place at the time and scapegoated emacs for my lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong it is possible to spend a lot of time fiddling with your config files for emacs. I picked emacs up again after I quit…

I wish someone did a thorough comparison of emacs with the newer extensible editors, such as Sublime. Is there something substantial that Sublime users are missing?

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

#138

Post by alpaca128 »

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?

I'll have to disagree here. I'm using org-mode files even as a Vim user. Because compared to Markdown it has more basic syntax features and is fully compatible with LaTeX, making it both convenient and more powerful than Markdown.

Non-Emacs parsers aren't remotely complete or correct but the same applies to the huge variety of incompatible Markdown extensions and parsers in my experience. Some support tables, some don't, some can't handle standard table of content references.

And while you are right in that the interactive features of org-mode are Emacs exclusive they still are an advantage in my view: they are optional, independent of each other and documented. This means I was easily able to reproduce one of those features with some scripting in Vim while still keeping it conforming with the standard.

I think .org is a fantastic format because 100% of even its most advanced features are still rooted in plain text representation of the information, while its syntax is basically a superset of LaTeX, providing convenient shortcuts of the most common elements of text documents. This makes it universally readable and powerful when needed.

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

#139

Post by alpaca128 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #112

there is an org mode for vim, how good is it? https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode (also i never understood why collapsible nested lists make such a big difference)

I'll just say I opted to write my own org-mode syntax file(for syntax highlighting), file linking and time tracking for Vim instead of using the vim-orgmode plugin. That's enough for my personal org-mode based wiki and some organisational tasks.

The vim-orgmode plugin's performance was absolutely abyssmal when I last tried to use it, with input delays above a full second in some situations.

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

#140

Post by _mlxl »

burntoutfire wrote: post #137
_mlxl wrote: post #132

I once wrote a long comment on Hacker News about how I wasted 2 years on trying to learn emacs. I wish I could go back and stop anyone from ever reading it in case I put someone off from trying it. I was in a weird place at the time and scapegoated emacs for my lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong it is possible to spend a lot of time fiddling with your config files for emacs. I picked emacs up again after I quit…

I wish someone did a thorough comparison of emacs with the newer extensible editors, such as Sublime. Is there something substantial that Sublime users are missing?

I'll give two examples to showcase features other editors are missing - ownership over the editor, and the extent to which you can build on top of existing primitives.

1. Can you change where the command palette shows up in Sublime? In emacs (M-x is our Command Palette) I can not show it, I can show it as a full width pane that takes up 50% of the screen, or I could recreate the Sublime Text look and feel (top of the screen X width, Y height). This looks like a toy example but I'm trying to show that there is not a single part of emacs I don't have control over.

2. Okay how would you do the following in sublime;

Your company is getting into credit checking. As such you now are beholden to certain rules and regulations around the safety of your code, and now your product owners want an update every time CreditCheck.java is modified by someone. They want to be notified in a Slack channel and also by email. They don't care if the top 30 lines are changed, but anything after that is important.

In emacs, I would make a hook for CreditCheck.java that any time I saved the file, it would run through the changes, check if there is a diff from line 31 onwards, and if so send a slack notification and send-mail the diff to the product owners.

I would just open my settings.org file and add the emacs-lisp to do this and I wouldn't even need to restart to avail of it - I could just load-file and have it working. All within emacs. You could do this via a tangle of shell commands sure - but emacs lets you do it emacs-lisp with ease.

Programming in the real world is full of stupid like processes like this, and emacs makes it easy to accommodate them. (Not saying that you should accommodate them, but the real world can be messy)

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