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I've heard a lot of people talk about how it's a real game changer and that they can't live without it, but I'm not really clear on the specifics as to why. Are

I've heard a lot of people talk about how it's a real game changer and that they can't live without it, but I'm not really clear on the specifics as to why. Are there any "killer features" of org mode that I should know about? What exactly does it replace or augment in your workflow? You might be about to get yourself your first conversion to this tool!

taeric 9y ago
The article that was posted a few days about about literate dev ops covered all of the amazing features, to me. The part that is hard to really convey is just the fun of it. Being able to run a log dive to grab some data using standard grep/whatever, then to immediately pull it into either R or Python or just Gnuplot to get a visual is quite a nice trick. Top it off with a quick export to pdf/html/markdown to send to someone to confirm it. (Typically a stakeholder.) Add to this emacs TRAMP capabilities and I just need whatever tool I want on a machine I can ssh to. Don't have a good install of python locally for some reason, just set the :dir attribute of the block to my machine (or docker container. Or a series of jumps through combinations!) that has it, and I'm good. It does have some growing pains sometimes. I found that the SQL plugin didn't do the passwords as I wanted it to. But, that was a simple breakpoint and hot code fix away. (I, regretably, did not prepare a patch to send upstream...)
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  That sounds dope. I'll give it a spin! It'll be my first time using emacs--do you recommend plain emacs, or something like spacemacs?
  - taeric 9y ago
    Been so long since I made the switch, hard to say. I actually preferred being in an all new situation. And u used to constantly switch keyboard types and mouse hand. Main advice I have, that I don't think I really followed, make time. Literally pick some time to do something you were going to do anyway, but that you aren't in a rush to do. Preferably not on any critical path. It will be slower.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    I recently tried slacemacs, and based in my experience is use plain emacs. The problem with spacemacs as a beginner is it isn't quite emacs, and it isn't quite vim, and as a beginner you don't know how to translate vim and Emacs guides to spacemacs.
andreareina 9y ago
It's not so much that there's a single killer feature, but that it's able to pull from everything that emacs already does well, and interoperate between them. A common use-case for me is using one language to process some data then passing the result to another tool (e.g. gnuplot, graphviz) visualize the results.

taeric 9y ago

The article that was posted a few days about about literate dev ops covered all of the amazing features, to me. The part that is hard to really convey is just the fun of it. Being able to run a log dive to grab some data using standard grep/whatever, then to immediately pull it into either R or Python or just Gnuplot to get a visual is quite a nice trick. Top it off with a quick export to pdf/html/markdown to send to someone to confirm it. (Typically a stakeholder.) Add to this emacs TRAMP capabilities and I just need whatever tool I want on a machine I can ssh to. Don't have a good install of python locally for some reason, just set the :dir attribute of the block to my machine (or docker container. Or a series of jumps through combinations!) that has it, and I'm good. It does have some growing pains sometimes. I found that the SQL plugin didn't do the passwords as I wanted it to. But, that was a simple breakpoint and hot code fix away. (I, regretably, did not prepare a patch to send upstream...)

eat_veggies 9y ago
That sounds dope. I'll give it a spin! It'll be my first time using emacs--do you recommend plain emacs, or something like spacemacs?
- taeric 9y ago
  Been so long since I made the switch, hard to say. I actually preferred being in an all new situation. And u used to constantly switch keyboard types and mouse hand. Main advice I have, that I don't think I really followed, make time. Literally pick some time to do something you were going to do anyway, but that you aren't in a rush to do. Preferably not on any critical path. It will be slower.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  I recently tried slacemacs, and based in my experience is use plain emacs. The problem with spacemacs as a beginner is it isn't quite emacs, and it isn't quite vim, and as a beginner you don't know how to translate vim and Emacs guides to spacemacs.

andreareina 9y ago

It's not so much that there's a single killer feature, but that it's able to pull from everything that emacs already does well, and interoperate between them. A common use-case for me is using one language to process some data then passing the result to another tool (e.g. gnuplot, graphviz) visualize the results.