Ditching Obsidian and building my own

My team does use Slack app and I use it too. The point is not to do "everything in Emacs" because you love that so much. The point is that when plain text is the main medium (and for majority of tasks we deal with daily, it is), then using text-oriented tools can give you certain edge.

When communicating over Slack my colleagues would send me a ticket number in Jira or a link to some code snippet on GH. When I have to share the same (or similar) stuff — I can easily provide the exact link to the ticket, with its description, I can quickly retrieve some relevant data from that ticket, if I'm adding some notes. When I'm sharing a link to a code snippet, I can easily retrieve the fully-qualified namespace and the name of the function, so the url is not some arbitrary incantation that my teammates have to guess about before clicking on it — it contains the exact piece of information they may like to see even before opening it.

When someone shares 'some incantation' with me, I don't even hesitate — I delegate the task to Emacs, and it is smart enough to recognize that a piece of plain text like "XYZ-146" is a Jira ticket, that "RFC-6364" is a document, that a github url is a link to a PR — with a single keystroke I can browse the jira ticket, read RFC document, explore the changes in the PR. I can invoke an LLM on the spot to summarize the points of the RFC document, to give me some insight to add a comment to the PR review.

All that without a hassle, all that done with simple keystrokes, all in one place. I can easily copy relevant information into my notes, I can grab stuff from my notes and share with my colleagues, easily converting Org-mode markup into Markdown without even blinking. The flow is there. And that flow also contributes to the general well-being of my teammates. I can assure you, they are happier with me using Emacs, even though most of them don't even know anything about it.

> the value proposition of emacs simple is no longer there

My main point from the get-go was that most people don’t even realize what a ‘value proposition’ there is.

I only know my perspective:

I get the appeal of Emacs but this is exactly where it falls short for me. It’s brittle, monolithic, and too controlling (restricting).

Emacs owns the entire platform. If you want to use an external tool, you have to wrap it in Emacs abstractions. That means dealing with buffers, subprocess plumbing, or writing Elisp bindings. You’re not really integrating; you’re translating everything into “Emacs-speak.”

Meanwhile, tools outside Emacs—like in a Unix shell—are composable by default. I can swap fzf for peco, tesseract for ocrmypdf, or even Neovim for Helix without rewriting my entire environment. That’s real modularity. With Emacs, everything is wired together internally, so small changes can break big things.

And yeah, I can technically replicate workflows inside Emacs, but often it’s reinventing worse versions of tools I already have—eshell instead of zsh, eww instead of a browser, magit instead of plain git in a terminal. That makes it feel more like a self-contained OS than a part of the system.

I’d rather keep my editor focused and compose my environment around it—not inside it. Plus, I rather do certain things in Lua, Python, shell, etc. where I can call it and run it through awk, sed, rg/grep, and so on. I can port that to any other platform and adapt it quickly rather than try to rewrite Lisp.

So... to answer your points specifically --

Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? -- Sure. Using my PDF editor.

Or watch videos? -- I think that's a little easier in shell (mpv, vlc) or directly in a browser.

Or manage the library of your ebooks? -- Calibre

Or track your expenses? -- I have a tool for that.

Or control project management like Jira? -- Jira or their respective tool(s).

Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? -- Neovim+Lua

Or interact with LLMs? -- There's a shell script for that, browser, or the ChatGPT application.

Or explore APIs like Postman? -- curl, wget, ... or Postman itself.

Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? -- Inside Anki. I have a simple shell tool that goes through them as well.

Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? -- In their respective apps?

Or find and read RFCs and manpages? -- My browser, or the shell.

Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? -- I think it's called a browser. Or the shell.

Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? -- Browser. Or the shell.

Or to order pizza? -- Browser. Or the shell.

Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? -- You got me there.

Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? -- You got me here, too. I don't have a need for this.

Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? -- stow, git

List, browse and code review Pull Requests, -- browser, git

etc. -- etc.

etc. -- etc.

Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? -- I feel like I answered this.

Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities. -- I'm aware.

Thanks, this was an entertaining 10 minutes to write.

I love to see this! I live and breathe emacs+org mode, and any way to have it look a little more modern (especially in its image handling), and be usable on the go is a huge win for the format.

While joplin's notes are stored in a database, they are still markdown files

I thought I was pretty clear? It would be nice to be able to call functions from org-mode and its related packages without having Emacs installed, or with some minimal subset of emacs meant for the commandline which caters to the needs of people running headless commands. It would solve a whole ton of issues for me. In particular, org-roam-ui is amazing. To run it, I have to open emacs and then... have emacs launch it into a browser for me. But the hosted interface won't export to anything that can be statically (or dynamically, really) hosted, so I can never access this awesome note-viewing interface from the web, even though to do it locally I already have to use a browser?

I have a project for hosting org-roam-ui as a website that took a ton of finagling to figure out and is extremely brittle. I had to finally load a custom .el script to prepare emacs to even try to evaluate the 'org-roam-ui' command from the commandline. If emacs prioritized headless / cli operations, this wouldn't have been such a nightmare, but it absolutely was. Just finding the right ports and re-assigning them to get out of each others way was a huge learning curve even for a seasoned emacs-er.

> It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM

No, it's not. It's wishing for basic functionality offered by all other markup languages of which I'm aware. That includes latex and everything supported by pandoc. Org-mode can do all sorts of crazy rendering tasks from its files, and it is worse than pulling teeth to get that functionality into a build pipeline of any kind.