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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

#171

Post by thom »

billwear wrote: post #110
rz2k wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On a similar note, I have found on Linux that just switching to a virtual terminal and running Emacs in text mode is an absolutely wonderful way of achieving deep focus without distractions. Obviously not much use if you need a web browser on your second monitor though.

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

#172

Post by yourapostasy »

bananamerica wrote: post #152
deleuze wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Emacs is better at being Vim than Vim

One thing I like more about Vim is that its ideal for quick edits in the command line. I don't my whole Emacs init for that. Maintaining two sets of configurations on Emacs is not as simple as it should be.

Try configuring your environment so you run constantly within your Emacs, and use tramp to get to those quick edits. I do reach for vim when I'm on like an airgapped or DMZ'd system, so I totally know what you are saying. Tramping out to nearly all my servers has let me retain for longer the threads of flow established within my Emacs session.

Lately, I've been experimenting with CRIU preserving my tmux'd Emacs session state. So unless an OS update hits libraries my Emacs session needs to reload, I should be able to maintain a better relocatable resumable state than even the Emacs desktop alone could.

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

#173

Post by ubermonkey »

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 think that's a completely fair question.

If you're not on desktop Linux, and you don't have years of experience using emacs, I'm not sure there's a great reason to switch to it from Sublime (or any other extensible editor) just on the merits.

I tried emacs many, many times over the years, and always ended up going back to something more modern because I liked them better -- BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime, etc.

(I'm leaving aside the FOSS arguments here, which are reasonable and fair; I just mean workflow/feature reasons.)

All that said, I did end up converting to emacs eventually, about 5 years ago. Why?

OrgMode.

I couldn't find anything else that did what I really wanted in terms of note-taking and to-do tracking, and what I wanted seemed to me to be pretty simple: I wanted to be able to write in plain text, keep notes in multiple files, use outlining, and have some kind elaborate searching tool that would filter through them and show me the lines I'd marked as to-do.

Interleaving the notes with the todos was mandatory for me -- I need context.

Obviously, I could write something simple to do this, but OrgMode is built around this idea from the getgo and works BEAUTIFULLY.

And to the best of my knowledge no such equivalent exists for Sublime, or any other extensible editor.

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

#175

Post by rini17 »

dingaling wrote: post #120

It takes impressive wordplay to contort Emacs and org-mode into a philosophy of "Keep it simple"...

I have burned myself with orgmode exactly because of the deceptive simplicity. It did not pick up some important TODO items because of my slight misformatting.

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

#176

Post by noahl »

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…

I have a suspicion, which I have never verified, that the things that make emacs great are basically the things that made Lisp Machines great back when those were a thing - that emacs is best viewed as a Lisp Machine embedded in a modern operating system.

I never used a real Lisp Machine, but I'd love if someone who did can confirm this.

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

#177

Post by oh_sigh »

_mlxl wrote: post #140
burntoutfire wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The OS probably has this feature - inotify/fswatch. It's not clear why you would want you text editor to do that for you.

What if another program edits the file? What if you accidentally pull up notepad.exe and edit it?

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

#179

Post by blindluke »

IanCal wrote: post #169
_mlxl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I entirely disagree with you here given the context - I am answering the question "Is there something substantial that Sublime users are missing?". What I described is a substantial benefit of using emacs over sublime text. If you are a programmer there are many benefits to total control over a system, and the ability to compose new functionality from a solid foundation of base functions. Now, you could hap…

> What I described is a substantial benefit of using emacs over sublime text. I think you're _assuming_ "more control" is a substantial benefit for them. > The OP wasn't asking why would anyone want control they were asking what are the benefits of emacs in comparison to sublime. Right, but if you don't see a strong use case for that control it isn't a benefit. The examples you gave were of changing the UI in a way I…

> Giving me the ability to do something I do not want to do is not beneficial.

Expecting that an example should be tailor-made is not very beneficial, either. When I go out to buy a car, and the salesman tells me the trunk is big enough to fit a grown pig, this information is of use to me. Not because I smuggle livestock, but because this gives me a good idea of what the capacity is.

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

#180

Post by benhurmarcel »

komali2 wrote: post #75
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.

The lines are too long. It's not very readable.
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