19 ms·

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

307 points by billwear 6y ago

Rerarom 6y ago
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.
- brandonmenc 6y ago
  Longtime (two-decade-ish) previous emacs user. I lived in it. I used it for literally everything - web browsing, mail, mp3 playing, etc. > I am afraid I'm missing something. You are not. Nowadays I just use crappy little text editors for small notes and JetBrains IDEs for dev work.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I needed to hear that; articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me. It wouldn't be the first task tracking application I'd be trying. Right now I use intellij for my main development work; I use some keyboard combinations where applicable (and changed the keymap to Sublime Text because I've used it and its derivatives (vs code mainly) for the better part of my career. I don't have a dedicated flow for task tracking. Right now for work we use Phabricator, it's a bit awkward because it's a heap of independent modules built on top of each other, but it met our requirements (free, open source, self-hosted, not shit). For a while I used a todo.txt addon in Sublime Text, which worked great; haven't been able to find a good alternative to it. Used Wunderlist for a while, but I couldn't find my finished tasks without paying and it's been discontinued. Same with Todoist, minus the discontinued-ness. Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me; I'm pretty good at typing if I do say so myself (~120wpm according to online tests / typeracer and co), but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. I also didn't grow up with *nix systems, commandline only became a thing once I started my education and career ~15 years ago.
    - codygman 6y ago
      > > I am afraid I'm missing something. > You are not You are missing an entire world treated as text and a consistent and an endlessly configurable interface for everything you can pull into your emacs Borg. See this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 Note, many still use emacs for what the GP described and more.
      - brandonmenc 6y ago
        Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.
        codygman 6y ago
        > Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Yeah? I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is here since you can just get by with nano and a terminal. > Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. I frequent the places that the "cultists" would most likely be and the prevailing theme is "if your workflow works, keep it, but emacs could do X for you". > There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. Yeah, but that doesn't mean Emacs wouldn't make them less or more productive. I don't think I've seen the "you need emacs" strawman your arguing against in practice. > And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Would those people be more or less productive without emacs? I find answering questions like this for myself difficult, I can't imagine trying to decide others would be better off not using an editor. Isn't saying lots of people exist that would be more productive without the kind of presumption that annoyed you from the Emacs cult? > Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv. Right, which is why I commented what the other user was missing and not "you need this".
- tgbugs 6y ago
  An anecdote on what you might be missing. There is nothing concrete that not using org-mode would cause you to miss out on, it is rather the possibility of being able to access one of countless workflows that have been built on top of it. When I started to use org-mode it was because I needed to generate a gant chart and I wanted a text format. I haven't used that functionality every again. Since then I have used org-mode for a variety of things, but never all at once, always a little piece at a time. Typeset a thesis in latex? Execute analysis code in a reproducible way? Write DRY bash scripts and tangle (compile) them? Run and log the output of one-off commands on remote servers so that if you ever have to do it again you have a record of it? The list goes on and on. Last week I was told that I needed to start keeping track of the time I spend working on different tasks. Despite keeping todo lists I have never used the org clocking functions, ye there they were there, just a C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o away. Integrated into my workflow when I needed it with all of 30 seconds of effort and two key combinations of overhead. Emacs is useful because countless others have encountered problems the likes of which a single person only rarely dreams. Not only that but they have probably already implemented a solution that is fairly easy to find once you encounter the problem and in 80% of the cases can be used unmodified. Yes, you and all the rest of us are missing something. It is impossible NOT to miss something and no tool can solve that for you. The question to me is whether you want to spend your time learning a tool and integrating with an ecosystem where you never have the possibility of benefiting from the things that others did not miss.
- bananamerica 6y ago
  Emacs is great, but use whatever you want. Of course you’ll be missing on something but that’s true for a lot of things.
  - taeric 6y ago
    Worth underscoring that you are always missing something. You don't dodge that bullet by using emacs, just pick what you want to miss.
    - bitdeveloper 6y ago
      For example, if you do choose to use emacs, then you are missing out on time you could have spent learning vim.
      - philosopher1234 6y ago
        Nothing like a bit of vim vs emacs. Though I do get sick of vim winning every time ;)
        bananamerica 6y ago
        Vim and Emacs are not in the same category. Direct comparisons are silly and useless, like comparing Pycharm and Notepad++.
        craig131 6y ago
        Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        bananamerica 6y ago
        This says nothing about the matter at hand. The concept of category is useful, regardless of its impreciseness. And some categorizations are better than others. > Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them. That’s also patently false: many things belong to the same category. Everything that exists belongs to the existent category, for example.
- umvi 6y ago
  I think the appeal is hack-ability. You can easily write a little Lisp program that hooks into emacs which you can trigger any number of ways.
- na85 6y ago
  I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already knows emacs, so it's hard to learn. To wit: Again I really really like Emacs as a piece of software, and I've been using it for like 10 years now. Maybe 3 or 4 of those years I've been using it reasonably seriously and even I find my eyes glaze over because of how dense and unapproachable the documentation is. On top of that, being a political project, Stallman actively resists certain improvements to Emacs that would for example make it work better on my Mac, because my Mac is nonfree and Stallman would rather have an objectively poorer piece of software than one that "encourages" using MacOS. And of course the other senior people in the Emacs project don't want to go against Stallman, so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name. If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Alas I don't have the skill nor the time to attempt such a thing. Edit: hey how about a substantive reply rather than drive-by downvotes?
  - omaranto 6y ago
    > If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)
  - 6y ago
- antoineMoPa 6y ago
  Just sit down and follow the tutorial that you can click in the emacs homescreen. It is not that easy, but the effort you invest in learning emacs will pay off eventually.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Emacs is just a different universe. You either learn to live in it or you don’t. That’s all there is to it.
- totetsu 6y ago
  I only really use emacs for Org mode and Org mode extensions. It wasn't too hard to learn just enough emacs for that. The motivation comes from how fast and convenient org mode is as a journal and a static site generator, compared to other tools, and having all my documents in plain text for future proofing.
  - billwear 6y ago
    yes, exactly. i don't even pretend to know a shard of what's available in emacs. i think of it like being able to afford a full-size, professional mechanic's toolbox: you won't have a clue what half of those tools do, but if you run into some weird problem, you can figure out the tool and solve the problem without buying something else.
- thom 6y ago
  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 language like Ruby or especially Clojure, where there are a few core data structures, but many things that leverage them. This means that every time you learn part of the Ruby Array API, or a useful function to work on Clojure sequences, you get to use that _everywhere_. So all of Emacs' basic interactions (and they may seem weird to begin with but they're honestly just trying to save your wrists some pain) work everywhere. You can always trust your intuitive, spatial model of the thing you're looking at. Search backwards in a text file, find some text, select it, copy it, go back to the end and paste it. That works exactly the same in a shell. It works exactly the same in a database client. Or SSH'd into a server. Or replying to an email. Same gestures when entering commands, same gestures moving around in autocomplete popups. Everything you learn with Emacs (and later, everything you write with elisp), has a little incremental benefit to your power and productivity manipulating text. Except everything is text, and so it all multiplies together. For whatever reason, I've been trying VSCode on Windows the last couple of weeks, coming from an Emacs on Linux background. I cannot tell you how painful I find it, even after making a pretty good attempt to map all the keys correctly (snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs). But VSCode begins at a completely different level of abstraction to Emacs. It doesn't want to show you a text-based UI everywhere, and implement tools to manipulate text. It wants to show you windows and panels and configuration screens and extensions with their own behaviour. Everything is modal and different, some windows are special, and you can't just navigate around the same way everywhere. So, sure, this isn't for everyone, but it's what I love about Emacs, to the point that the many regular indignities it forces on you (hangs if you're not careful about large files, abysmal performance of various things on Windows because of the overhead of starting processes, and sure, the learning curve for some people) are bearable because everything is so natural.
  - kamaal 6y ago
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I have been using zim wiki. Its essentially just a basic text editor but it has a tree view for your files and supports basic syntax including check lists. I have found this suits basically all of my needs.
- naveen99 6y ago
  Checkout the emacs wiki: https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ See if you find any features or extensions that aren’t available on notepad++... My .emacs configuration is based on vim style modal shortcuts that make me faster than a mutant: https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.el https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.... I also use org-mode as a minor mode for autohotkey code editing, by changing the outline character from * to ; ... https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode
- bitwize 6y ago
  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.
- machinesbuddy 6y ago
  You are right if you are comfortable with your editor you're not missing a lot. I tried Emacs for a while it's nice and comfortable the moment your brain get used to the keyboard shortkeys though since it's a different word you start running everything in Emacs and it becomes your OS. Why it can be a problem is another story. Anyway I switched back to use different tools for different jobs. For taking notes and managing them I use Joplin it supports markdown, todo lists, etc. and you can even copy paste images into the editor. Lots of other features as well as sync with different backends.
  - clojureyoureyes 6y ago
    Emacs is not about shortcuts, you can use default, CUA, viper, Evil, or even custom ones. The main things are lisp and interactive commands.
- iLemming 6y ago
  I have used many popular and some esoteric editors and IDEs (some of them today would be considered forgotten). The last one was IntelliJ that I used very extensively. To the point of finding some undocumented features. I have participated in many conversations regarding plugins. I have almost started building my own. I was pleased with it. JetBrains does make an incredibly powerful IDEs. After almost seven years of using IntelliJ, I switched to Emacs. Emacs taught me something about myself that no other editor/IDE done before. It helped me to discover my hidden predilection. I realized that I am a tinkerer. You may say: "Aren't we all? We make software because we are tinkerers..." But there are two kinds of developers: non-conformist tinkerers and consumer-tinkerers. People who end up using Emacs are those who would choose Gentoo or Arch, first of all, because "fuck Windows" and "Ubuntu is lame", and then because they can do some crazy stuff like hijacking display brightness beyond default limits (because one time they had to stare at it, sitting on a beach). Sometimes they hook up their garage doors to a DB, so they can collect data and analyze it later. Or they build their own mechanical keyboards. Etc. Emacs taught me to abhor repetition and mundane tasks. It taught me that anything can be automated. Even Hell and Chaos can be automated. In that case, you simply end up having an automated hell and chaos. There are so many tiny examples, like whenever I'm writing something let's say in Python, and I would like to search for a code snippet on GitHub, I would simply select a piece of code in my editor and search for it - Emacs would navigate to GitHub, pass the string and even set the language to Python. Or whenever I need to create a new branch, I don't need to think about the name, I can use the ticket number and Emacs would request the issue tracker and create a branch name based on ticket's title. Or I can create a Gist (public or private) by pressing a couple of keys. And many, many more. I can watch anyone using their favorite IDE and whenever they do something so trivial, something they've been doing for a long time, and very often I'd think - "Oh, I know, more efficient way of doing the same thing" or "Ah, I've been doing it the same way for years, maybe it's time to improve it. I just realized that this is not efficient enough." But it's not just about efficiency - when you add a tiny bit of automation to your task, it becomes so much less frustrating. Of course, it is possible to have the same mindset and never get into Emacs. However, Emacs offers hundreds of tiny pieces to satisfy your needs. People say: "Emacs takes a long time to learn", but in reality - it would take you longer to become a true power-tinkerer using any other ecosystem of tools. But it is also totally okay not to be a power-tinkerer. I know many developers who don't use any fancy ways of doing things, but they are still quite impressively, very productive.
elwell 6y ago
I use Notes mostly, because it's synced to my phone and I can paste images (usually screenshots) in it easily.
- addajones 6y ago
  Same ! So easy and works incredibly well across multiple devices.
- yepthatsreality 6y ago
  Is this because you’d have to use iCloud otherwise and pay for storage? What about airdrop?
- burtonator 6y ago
  Which app? "Notes" is rather generic term so curious which app you're using
  - spullara 6y ago
    He means Apple Notes.
- knowingathing 6y ago
  Same. Emacs is my primary code driver during the day but for most things Notes is killer. One of Apples best apps right now.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  I use bear after using notes for quite awhile. Bear support Some sort of md. need to use IA writer when doing my thesis as searching is a problem.
- RMPR 6y ago
  FWIW you can set up sync to phone pretty easily, Orgzly is a org-mode client for Mobile working surprisingly well, supporting dropbox and many other backends for sync, plus both Emacs and Orgzly support pasting images. As far as I'm concerned I've set up syncthing to sync my org files between my devices.
svnpenn 6y ago
Does anyone know of a small Emacs distribution? I would like to get into Emacs, but its hard to justify 114 MB: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 Versus Vim 18 MB: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases
- barrkel 6y ago
  Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is about 150,000 MB. I have a little bit of difficulty justifying that on my SSD main drive. 114 MB for what is effectively an IDE for the long tail of programming languages is very easy to justify.
- throwqqq 6y ago
  That's 0.005 usd of hard drives. There is literally no one in the world who could notice the difference.
- dmd 6y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    This is a tangent, but I wish storage was that simple. Too many devices come with non-expandable storage and don't have very big options to start with, even if you're willing to pay well above the normal rate.
  - svnpenn 6y ago
    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.
    - anamexis 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
spenczar5 6y ago
> Network: Since I'm set up to send email, IRC, Mattermost, etc., directly from my org-mode tasks, it's easy to track where I am. I'd like to know more about this because it's something I struggle with while using org-mode. I want to have some sort of bidirectional link between org mode and Github issues for my projects; new issues should arrive in my "inbox" org file, and I'd like a simple way to update the status or commentary around issues from inside org-mode. Does anyone know of good tools for this sort of thing, or should I take the plunge and really write a lot of elisp?
- billwear 6y ago
  I'm afraid it's macros and elisp, but don't forget that you can write a good amount of useful elisp by recording macros and saving them in your .init file.
- tgbugs 6y ago
  org-sync [0] is all that I could find when I went to look into this last week. It does not have all the functionality that I would want (e.g. comments should be begin_src markdown blocks), but could serve as a start for something more, and it might meet your needs as is. 0. https://github.com/arbox/org-sync https://github.com/arbox/org-sync
jeppesen-io 6y ago
I wonder what the venn diagram looks like of those who enjoy the readability of this blog and use emacs
- tgbugs 6y ago
  Honestly at this point it is usually easier for me to read the raw org-mode source file in an emacs buffer than to wade through whatever random web rendering and author has picked when they export to html.
- billwear 6y ago
  thanks!
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  This is too peak HN for me.
  - jeppesen-io 6y ago
    I don't know if this is an insult or not but gave me a laugh. Cheers :)
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      haha, it's not :) Just making a joke that HN loves 1. emacs and 2. websites that are just a .txt file.
      - mercer 6y ago
        and jokes involving Venn diagrams.
  - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
    Lisp all the way down...
- iLemming 6y ago
  If you use eww in Emacs, the readability of that post would be exactly as you wanted it to be, given that you've spent enough time configuring and tweaking your Emacs theme. Emacs (in general) is not for everyone - but it can be that perfect tool, that is truly perfect just for you.
platz 6y ago
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?
- tgbugs 6y ago
  While I might have been concerned about this at one point in time, emacs and gcc are some of the most ported pieces of software in existence. That said, there have been some discussions about trying to work toward a specification for how things like org-babel should work so that other platforms can replicate the behavior inside of emacs. However, as others have stated elsewhere in the comments, once you accept emacs into your life there isn't really much incentive to spend time standardizing interfaces for things that can be handled more informally and as needed by the users. As a result those efforts need some internal incentive (like better or clearer documentation) to have development time allocated to them.
- iLemming 6y ago
  - 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 python snippet that when I evaluate, results would be piped it into another snippet in SQL that retrieves data from postgress, and then I can send a http request to a remote API based on what's in DB, and then use that to build a chart. Can you do that in Markdown? - LaTeX support. I can write some complex math formulas. - Exporting. I can turn my Org-mode file(s) into a reveal.js presentation, into a book, or a web-blog. - etc.
  - ORioN63 6y ago
    > If I wake you up in 3AM would you remember the format of links? is it parentheses first or brackets? I sure as well wouldn't. It confuses me thoroughly.
billwear 6y ago
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.
gandalfgeek 6y ago
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."
- iLemming 6y ago
  > 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 understand what makes Emacs so awesome, to learn and master it, one simply needs to embrace the single fundamental truth about it. Emacs based on Lisp. And please don't make a mistake - I am not talking here about a programming language. I am talking about an idea - one of the most magnificent ideas in computer science. Embrace the awesomeness of that idea, the fluidity, and malleability of the structure. Accept it with all its incredible power and some unavoidable flaws - and you will gain superpowers. Which is not necessarily a good thing. Let me explain. There's a scientific term "umwelt" that biologists use to describe the world as experienced by a particular organism. Every one of us has this "umwelt" - our "subjective view of the world." Our umwelt is limited by our physical and mental capabilities, past experiences, and social circles we grow up and live. e.g., your subjective understanding of Renaissance Art would drastically differ from when you're taken to a museum at the age of three, and when you go there as an adult, or after studying art for fifteen years. Learning and understanding Lisp expands your umwelt. You will start seeing things differently. It doesn't inevitably make you a better programmer; it might, but doesn't guarantee it, just like suddenly gaining the ability to see things in the infrared spectrum not guaranteed to make your life better. Finally, once you embrace the idea of Lisp, soon enough, you find out - humans have yet to invent a better Lisp environment than Emacs. And that's what Emacs is - it is not just an editor, it is not a mere IDE. Most importantly, it is a Lisp environment - living, "breathing", dynamic and malleable. That's what makes it so extensible. And that's what makes it so versatile. And that's why it will never die.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
there is an org mode for vim, how good is it? https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode (also i never understood why collapsible nested lists make such a big difference)
- theodcr 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki is probably the best note-taking plugin for vim.
  - episode0x01 6y ago
    I've been using vimwiki daily for the past month after I saw it mentioned here on HN. It's really changed a lot and has replaced the method I had before that involved VScode markdown snippets. It's nice to be able to directly link between my diary / task lists and my general knowledge base that contains code snippets and information about my projects, etc.
    - MichaelMoser123 6y ago
      i am still trying to figure: how is that any better than having the stuff as indented text, or writing it downs as markdown?
- alpaca128 6y ago
  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.
dingaling 6y ago
It takes impressive wordplay to contort Emacs and org-mode into a philosophy of "Keep it simple"...
- pritovido 6y ago
  I had exactly the same thoughts. "Simplicity. From the creators of <<in order to create a text editor, let's create an OS first>>" BTW, I love and hate emacs at the same time.
- tonetheman 6y ago
  This is a great comment.
- rini17 6y ago
  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.
- iLemming 6y ago
  I think you're confusing "simple" with "easy." You may be looking at the controls of a military helicopter for the first time - switches, knobs, buttons, joysticks, etc. and probably feel very confused. But ask any experienced pilot, "Why can't all that be replaced with a single touch-screen interface? Wouldn't that be so much friendlier and intuitive?" they'd look at you like you're out of your mind. For them, those controls are probably the most efficient interface they can imagine. There's a strong correlation between things that are confusing for the beginners, but over time become incredibly simple to use and things that are easy to start with, but over time they become cluttered, inefficient and frustrating to use. Emacs and Org-mode are not easy to learn, but they can simplify a lot of things later.
_mlxl 6y ago
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.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  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?
  - AJRF 6y ago
    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)
focus2020 6y ago
There is another Emacs package "pdftools" which is very underrated. It's amazing package, and just like org-mode pdftools will also be useful for the next several decades
jonathanstrange 6y ago
Whenever there's an Emacs thread I feel really bad like an impostor, because I'm using Emacs daily for work and hobby for the past 15 years now and still only use only 5 to 10 functions regularly. Heck, I can't even remember the keyboard combo for getting help about a mode. When I have to install a new package, I use Melpa and copy&paste init code for the .emacs file from the web. If it doesn't work or breaks, I usually just use another package because it's too hard to fix the error. My .emacs file is a total mess and I have no idea what 50% of the code in it is doing. Do I need it or should I comment it out? I don't know. Two years ago I tried to start using org mode and bought the printed org mode book but it just turned out to be too complicated and too much time to adapt all the publishing settings for me to be of any use. For a while I used a Bibtex tool which was weird to use, and now I'm using KBibtex again. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Emacs is a great editor but I wish someone made an AI-powered assistant called "clippy" for it that makes suggestions for commands one might use when working in Emacs. I just can't remember all those keyboard shortcuts for every mode.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Look into Spacemacs - it addresses a lot of what you want. It understands file extensions and automatically downloads curated sets of packages for what you're editing (no more arcane copying and pasting) The key bindings are set up so that pressing the first part of a key chord brings up all the things the next part of the key chord could be in the mini buffer
- O_H_E 6y ago
  Yeah, I firmly believe more software should be built on top of emacs to leverage its power and expressiveness behind a dicoverable interface for people who are too busy or have a life.
- taude 6y ago
  Sounds like the package which-key [1] might help you out. (It comes pre-configured for those who use Doom Emacs, but I was using it in my personal config for awhile.). From the about: which-key is a minor mode for Emacs that displays the key bindings following your currently entered incomplete command (a prefix) in a popup. [1] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key
devnullbyte 6y ago
I have had a few stints of trying out emacs. I used spacemacs, doom and rolled my own. It never gained any traction for me. I think the reason for this, is that the amount of time I would put into memorizing all the shortcuts and control / meta combinations, setting up all the lisp plugins (and then remembering their control key / meta combinations) is just not worth it for the time lost setting up and learning for the productivity gained. I am better to just use an IDE with all its bells and whistles and for general terminal work my old simple VIM set up easily does the job. As far as org-mode, meh. I really don't see whats so amazing about collapsible to-do notes anymore. As for email, listening to music etc, I am sorry, but browsers do that job very well and with zero time needed to scour around blogs trying to get them to work.
ashton314 6y ago
I was but a wee lad of seven years when my father took me to a closet in our family office/craft room space and gave me a login to a FreeBSD machine running there. He showed me how to use Emacs and mutt—I sent my first email via a TUI. It's been almost two decades since then, and I still use Emacs every day. I only recently got into org-mode. Boy was I missing out. I felt like a wizard compared to my classmates and peers, but now I feel like I've seriously leveled up. What motivated me to learn how to use org-mode was a nice solution that worked on mobile. My favorite org-mode client for mobile is beorg [1]. (No relation to the app, other than a happy customer.) For general note files, I generally use Working Copy. If you'd like to get into org-mode but are held back by the experience on mobile, give beorg a try. You will thank yourself. [1]: https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/
drivers99 6y ago
> The unwieldy part came with all the repeated tasks, and tasks that got carried over from one day to the next (or didn't get finished). I had to copy yesterday's file, change all the key info, sort out the todo list, erase yesterday's journal, and generally do far too much work to keep my journal up. I have that problem with my systems. I was hoping he would explain the solution specifically.

307 points by billwear 6y ago

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.

brandonmenc 6y ago
Longtime (two-decade-ish) previous emacs user. I lived in it. I used it for literally everything - web browsing, mail, mp3 playing, etc. > I am afraid I'm missing something. You are not. Nowadays I just use crappy little text editors for small notes and JetBrains IDEs for dev work.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I needed to hear that; articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me. It wouldn't be the first task tracking application I'd be trying. Right now I use intellij for my main development work; I use some keyboard combinations where applicable (and changed the keymap to Sublime Text because I've used it and its derivatives (vs code mainly) for the better part of my career. I don't have a dedicated flow for task tracking. Right now for work we use Phabricator, it's a bit awkward because it's a heap of independent modules built on top of each other, but it met our requirements (free, open source, self-hosted, not shit). For a while I used a todo.txt addon in Sublime Text, which worked great; haven't been able to find a good alternative to it. Used Wunderlist for a while, but I couldn't find my finished tasks without paying and it's been discontinued. Same with Todoist, minus the discontinued-ness. Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me; I'm pretty good at typing if I do say so myself (~120wpm according to online tests / typeracer and co), but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. I also didn't grow up with *nix systems, commandline only became a thing once I started my education and career ~15 years ago.
  - codygman 6y ago
    > > I am afraid I'm missing something. > You are not You are missing an entire world treated as text and a consistent and an endlessly configurable interface for everything you can pull into your emacs Borg. See this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 Note, many still use emacs for what the GP described and more.
    - brandonmenc 6y ago
      Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.
      - codygman 6y ago
        > Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Yeah? I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is here since you can just get by with nano and a terminal. > Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. I frequent the places that the "cultists" would most likely be and the prevailing theme is "if your workflow works, keep it, but emacs could do X for you". > There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. Yeah, but that doesn't mean Emacs wouldn't make them less or more productive. I don't think I've seen the "you need emacs" strawman your arguing against in practice. > And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Would those people be more or less productive without emacs? I find answering questions like this for myself difficult, I can't imagine trying to decide others would be better off not using an editor. Isn't saying lots of people exist that would be more productive without the kind of presumption that annoyed you from the Emacs cult? > Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv. Right, which is why I commented what the other user was missing and not "you need this".
tgbugs 6y ago
An anecdote on what you might be missing. There is nothing concrete that not using org-mode would cause you to miss out on, it is rather the possibility of being able to access one of countless workflows that have been built on top of it. When I started to use org-mode it was because I needed to generate a gant chart and I wanted a text format. I haven't used that functionality every again. Since then I have used org-mode for a variety of things, but never all at once, always a little piece at a time. Typeset a thesis in latex? Execute analysis code in a reproducible way? Write DRY bash scripts and tangle (compile) them? Run and log the output of one-off commands on remote servers so that if you ever have to do it again you have a record of it? The list goes on and on. Last week I was told that I needed to start keeping track of the time I spend working on different tasks. Despite keeping todo lists I have never used the org clocking functions, ye there they were there, just a C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o away. Integrated into my workflow when I needed it with all of 30 seconds of effort and two key combinations of overhead. Emacs is useful because countless others have encountered problems the likes of which a single person only rarely dreams. Not only that but they have probably already implemented a solution that is fairly easy to find once you encounter the problem and in 80% of the cases can be used unmodified. Yes, you and all the rest of us are missing something. It is impossible NOT to miss something and no tool can solve that for you. The question to me is whether you want to spend your time learning a tool and integrating with an ecosystem where you never have the possibility of benefiting from the things that others did not miss.
bananamerica 6y ago
Emacs is great, but use whatever you want. Of course you’ll be missing on something but that’s true for a lot of things.
- taeric 6y ago
  Worth underscoring that you are always missing something. You don't dodge that bullet by using emacs, just pick what you want to miss.
  - bitdeveloper 6y ago
    For example, if you do choose to use emacs, then you are missing out on time you could have spent learning vim.
    - philosopher1234 6y ago
      Nothing like a bit of vim vs emacs. Though I do get sick of vim winning every time ;)
      - bananamerica 6y ago
        Vim and Emacs are not in the same category. Direct comparisons are silly and useless, like comparing Pycharm and Notepad++.
        craig131 6y ago
        Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        bananamerica 6y ago
        This says nothing about the matter at hand. The concept of category is useful, regardless of its impreciseness. And some categorizations are better than others. > Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them. That’s also patently false: many things belong to the same category. Everything that exists belongs to the existent category, for example.
umvi 6y ago
I think the appeal is hack-ability. You can easily write a little Lisp program that hooks into emacs which you can trigger any number of ways.
na85 6y ago
I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already knows emacs, so it's hard to learn. To wit: Again I really really like Emacs as a piece of software, and I've been using it for like 10 years now. Maybe 3 or 4 of those years I've been using it reasonably seriously and even I find my eyes glaze over because of how dense and unapproachable the documentation is. On top of that, being a political project, Stallman actively resists certain improvements to Emacs that would for example make it work better on my Mac, because my Mac is nonfree and Stallman would rather have an objectively poorer piece of software than one that "encourages" using MacOS. And of course the other senior people in the Emacs project don't want to go against Stallman, so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name. If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Alas I don't have the skill nor the time to attempt such a thing. Edit: hey how about a substantive reply rather than drive-by downvotes?
- omaranto 6y ago
  > If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)
- 6y ago
antoineMoPa 6y ago
Just sit down and follow the tutorial that you can click in the emacs homescreen. It is not that easy, but the effort you invest in learning emacs will pay off eventually.
Koshkin 6y ago
Emacs is just a different universe. You either learn to live in it or you don’t. That’s all there is to it.
totetsu 6y ago
I only really use emacs for Org mode and Org mode extensions. It wasn't too hard to learn just enough emacs for that. The motivation comes from how fast and convenient org mode is as a journal and a static site generator, compared to other tools, and having all my documents in plain text for future proofing.
- billwear 6y ago
  yes, exactly. i don't even pretend to know a shard of what's available in emacs. i think of it like being able to afford a full-size, professional mechanic's toolbox: you won't have a clue what half of those tools do, but if you run into some weird problem, you can figure out the tool and solve the problem without buying something else.
thom 6y ago
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 language like Ruby or especially Clojure, where there are a few core data structures, but many things that leverage them. This means that every time you learn part of the Ruby Array API, or a useful function to work on Clojure sequences, you get to use that _everywhere_. So all of Emacs' basic interactions (and they may seem weird to begin with but they're honestly just trying to save your wrists some pain) work everywhere. You can always trust your intuitive, spatial model of the thing you're looking at. Search backwards in a text file, find some text, select it, copy it, go back to the end and paste it. That works exactly the same in a shell. It works exactly the same in a database client. Or SSH'd into a server. Or replying to an email. Same gestures when entering commands, same gestures moving around in autocomplete popups. Everything you learn with Emacs (and later, everything you write with elisp), has a little incremental benefit to your power and productivity manipulating text. Except everything is text, and so it all multiplies together. For whatever reason, I've been trying VSCode on Windows the last couple of weeks, coming from an Emacs on Linux background. I cannot tell you how painful I find it, even after making a pretty good attempt to map all the keys correctly (snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs). But VSCode begins at a completely different level of abstraction to Emacs. It doesn't want to show you a text-based UI everywhere, and implement tools to manipulate text. It wants to show you windows and panels and configuration screens and extensions with their own behaviour. Everything is modal and different, some windows are special, and you can't just navigate around the same way everywhere. So, sure, this isn't for everyone, but it's what I love about Emacs, to the point that the many regular indignities it forces on you (hangs if you're not careful about large files, abysmal performance of various things on Windows because of the overhead of starting processes, and sure, the learning curve for some people) are bearable because everything is so natural.
- kamaal 6y ago
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I have been using zim wiki. Its essentially just a basic text editor but it has a tree view for your files and supports basic syntax including check lists. I have found this suits basically all of my needs.
naveen99 6y ago
Checkout the emacs wiki: https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ See if you find any features or extensions that aren’t available on notepad++... My .emacs configuration is based on vim style modal shortcuts that make me faster than a mutant: https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.el https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.... I also use org-mode as a minor mode for autohotkey code editing, by changing the outline character from * to ; ... https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode
bitwize 6y ago
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.
machinesbuddy 6y ago
You are right if you are comfortable with your editor you're not missing a lot. I tried Emacs for a while it's nice and comfortable the moment your brain get used to the keyboard shortkeys though since it's a different word you start running everything in Emacs and it becomes your OS. Why it can be a problem is another story. Anyway I switched back to use different tools for different jobs. For taking notes and managing them I use Joplin it supports markdown, todo lists, etc. and you can even copy paste images into the editor. Lots of other features as well as sync with different backends.
- clojureyoureyes 6y ago
  Emacs is not about shortcuts, you can use default, CUA, viper, Evil, or even custom ones. The main things are lisp and interactive commands.
iLemming 6y ago
I have used many popular and some esoteric editors and IDEs (some of them today would be considered forgotten). The last one was IntelliJ that I used very extensively. To the point of finding some undocumented features. I have participated in many conversations regarding plugins. I have almost started building my own. I was pleased with it. JetBrains does make an incredibly powerful IDEs. After almost seven years of using IntelliJ, I switched to Emacs. Emacs taught me something about myself that no other editor/IDE done before. It helped me to discover my hidden predilection. I realized that I am a tinkerer. You may say: "Aren't we all? We make software because we are tinkerers..." But there are two kinds of developers: non-conformist tinkerers and consumer-tinkerers. People who end up using Emacs are those who would choose Gentoo or Arch, first of all, because "fuck Windows" and "Ubuntu is lame", and then because they can do some crazy stuff like hijacking display brightness beyond default limits (because one time they had to stare at it, sitting on a beach). Sometimes they hook up their garage doors to a DB, so they can collect data and analyze it later. Or they build their own mechanical keyboards. Etc. Emacs taught me to abhor repetition and mundane tasks. It taught me that anything can be automated. Even Hell and Chaos can be automated. In that case, you simply end up having an automated hell and chaos. There are so many tiny examples, like whenever I'm writing something let's say in Python, and I would like to search for a code snippet on GitHub, I would simply select a piece of code in my editor and search for it - Emacs would navigate to GitHub, pass the string and even set the language to Python. Or whenever I need to create a new branch, I don't need to think about the name, I can use the ticket number and Emacs would request the issue tracker and create a branch name based on ticket's title. Or I can create a Gist (public or private) by pressing a couple of keys. And many, many more. I can watch anyone using their favorite IDE and whenever they do something so trivial, something they've been doing for a long time, and very often I'd think - "Oh, I know, more efficient way of doing the same thing" or "Ah, I've been doing it the same way for years, maybe it's time to improve it. I just realized that this is not efficient enough." But it's not just about efficiency - when you add a tiny bit of automation to your task, it becomes so much less frustrating. Of course, it is possible to have the same mindset and never get into Emacs. However, Emacs offers hundreds of tiny pieces to satisfy your needs. People say: "Emacs takes a long time to learn", but in reality - it would take you longer to become a true power-tinkerer using any other ecosystem of tools. But it is also totally okay not to be a power-tinkerer. I know many developers who don't use any fancy ways of doing things, but they are still quite impressively, very productive.

elwell 6y ago

I use Notes mostly, because it's synced to my phone and I can paste images (usually screenshots) in it easily.

addajones 6y ago
Same ! So easy and works incredibly well across multiple devices.
yepthatsreality 6y ago
Is this because you’d have to use iCloud otherwise and pay for storage? What about airdrop?
burtonator 6y ago
Which app? "Notes" is rather generic term so curious which app you're using
- spullara 6y ago
  He means Apple Notes.
knowingathing 6y ago
Same. Emacs is my primary code driver during the day but for most things Notes is killer. One of Apples best apps right now.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
I use bear after using notes for quite awhile. Bear support Some sort of md. need to use IA writer when doing my thesis as searching is a problem.
RMPR 6y ago
FWIW you can set up sync to phone pretty easily, Orgzly is a org-mode client for Mobile working surprisingly well, supporting dropbox and many other backends for sync, plus both Emacs and Orgzly support pasting images. As far as I'm concerned I've set up syncthing to sync my org files between my devices.

svnpenn 6y ago

Does anyone know of a small Emacs distribution? I would like to get into Emacs, but its hard to justify 114 MB: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 Versus Vim 18 MB: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases

barrkel 6y ago
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is about 150,000 MB. I have a little bit of difficulty justifying that on my SSD main drive. 114 MB for what is effectively an IDE for the long tail of programming languages is very easy to justify.
throwqqq 6y ago
That's 0.005 usd of hard drives. There is literally no one in the world who could notice the difference.
dmd 6y ago
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.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  This is a tangent, but I wish storage was that simple. Too many devices come with non-expandable storage and don't have very big options to start with, even if you're willing to pay well above the normal rate.
- svnpenn 6y ago
  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.
  - anamexis 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

spenczar5 6y ago

> Network: Since I'm set up to send email, IRC, Mattermost, etc., directly from my org-mode tasks, it's easy to track where I am. I'd like to know more about this because it's something I struggle with while using org-mode. I want to have some sort of bidirectional link between org mode and Github issues for my projects; new issues should arrive in my "inbox" org file, and I'd like a simple way to update the status or commentary around issues from inside org-mode. Does anyone know of good tools for this sort of thing, or should I take the plunge and really write a lot of elisp?

billwear 6y ago
I'm afraid it's macros and elisp, but don't forget that you can write a good amount of useful elisp by recording macros and saving them in your .init file.
tgbugs 6y ago
org-sync [0] is all that I could find when I went to look into this last week. It does not have all the functionality that I would want (e.g. comments should be begin_src markdown blocks), but could serve as a start for something more, and it might meet your needs as is. 0. https://github.com/arbox/org-sync https://github.com/arbox/org-sync

jeppesen-io 6y ago

I wonder what the venn diagram looks like of those who enjoy the readability of this blog and use emacs

tgbugs 6y ago
Honestly at this point it is usually easier for me to read the raw org-mode source file in an emacs buffer than to wade through whatever random web rendering and author has picked when they export to html.
billwear 6y ago
thanks!
ciarannolan 6y ago
This is too peak HN for me.
- jeppesen-io 6y ago
  I don't know if this is an insult or not but gave me a laugh. Cheers :)
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    haha, it's not :) Just making a joke that HN loves 1. emacs and 2. websites that are just a .txt file.
    - mercer 6y ago
      and jokes involving Venn diagrams.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  Lisp all the way down...
iLemming 6y ago
If you use eww in Emacs, the readability of that post would be exactly as you wanted it to be, given that you've spent enough time configuring and tweaking your Emacs theme. Emacs (in general) is not for everyone - but it can be that perfect tool, that is truly perfect just for you.

platz 6y ago

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?

tgbugs 6y ago
While I might have been concerned about this at one point in time, emacs and gcc are some of the most ported pieces of software in existence. That said, there have been some discussions about trying to work toward a specification for how things like org-babel should work so that other platforms can replicate the behavior inside of emacs. However, as others have stated elsewhere in the comments, once you accept emacs into your life there isn't really much incentive to spend time standardizing interfaces for things that can be handled more informally and as needed by the users. As a result those efforts need some internal incentive (like better or clearer documentation) to have development time allocated to them.
iLemming 6y ago
- 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 python snippet that when I evaluate, results would be piped it into another snippet in SQL that retrieves data from postgress, and then I can send a http request to a remote API based on what's in DB, and then use that to build a chart. Can you do that in Markdown? - LaTeX support. I can write some complex math formulas. - Exporting. I can turn my Org-mode file(s) into a reveal.js presentation, into a book, or a web-blog. - etc.
- ORioN63 6y ago
  > If I wake you up in 3AM would you remember the format of links? is it parentheses first or brackets? I sure as well wouldn't. It confuses me thoroughly.

billwear 6y ago

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.

gandalfgeek 6y ago

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."

iLemming 6y ago
> 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 understand what makes Emacs so awesome, to learn and master it, one simply needs to embrace the single fundamental truth about it. Emacs based on Lisp. And please don't make a mistake - I am not talking here about a programming language. I am talking about an idea - one of the most magnificent ideas in computer science. Embrace the awesomeness of that idea, the fluidity, and malleability of the structure. Accept it with all its incredible power and some unavoidable flaws - and you will gain superpowers. Which is not necessarily a good thing. Let me explain. There's a scientific term "umwelt" that biologists use to describe the world as experienced by a particular organism. Every one of us has this "umwelt" - our "subjective view of the world." Our umwelt is limited by our physical and mental capabilities, past experiences, and social circles we grow up and live. e.g., your subjective understanding of Renaissance Art would drastically differ from when you're taken to a museum at the age of three, and when you go there as an adult, or after studying art for fifteen years. Learning and understanding Lisp expands your umwelt. You will start seeing things differently. It doesn't inevitably make you a better programmer; it might, but doesn't guarantee it, just like suddenly gaining the ability to see things in the infrared spectrum not guaranteed to make your life better. Finally, once you embrace the idea of Lisp, soon enough, you find out - humans have yet to invent a better Lisp environment than Emacs. And that's what Emacs is - it is not just an editor, it is not a mere IDE. Most importantly, it is a Lisp environment - living, "breathing", dynamic and malleable. That's what makes it so extensible. And that's what makes it so versatile. And that's why it will never die.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

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

theodcr 6y ago
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 https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki is probably the best note-taking plugin for vim.
- episode0x01 6y ago
  I've been using vimwiki daily for the past month after I saw it mentioned here on HN. It's really changed a lot and has replaced the method I had before that involved VScode markdown snippets. It's nice to be able to directly link between my diary / task lists and my general knowledge base that contains code snippets and information about my projects, etc.
  - MichaelMoser123 6y ago
    i am still trying to figure: how is that any better than having the stuff as indented text, or writing it downs as markdown?
alpaca128 6y ago
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.

dingaling 6y ago

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

pritovido 6y ago
I had exactly the same thoughts. "Simplicity. From the creators of <<in order to create a text editor, let's create an OS first>>" BTW, I love and hate emacs at the same time.
tonetheman 6y ago
This is a great comment.
rini17 6y ago
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.
iLemming 6y ago
I think you're confusing "simple" with "easy." You may be looking at the controls of a military helicopter for the first time - switches, knobs, buttons, joysticks, etc. and probably feel very confused. But ask any experienced pilot, "Why can't all that be replaced with a single touch-screen interface? Wouldn't that be so much friendlier and intuitive?" they'd look at you like you're out of your mind. For them, those controls are probably the most efficient interface they can imagine. There's a strong correlation between things that are confusing for the beginners, but over time become incredibly simple to use and things that are easy to start with, but over time they become cluttered, inefficient and frustrating to use. Emacs and Org-mode are not easy to learn, but they can simplify a lot of things later.

_mlxl 6y ago

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.

burntoutfire 6y ago
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?
- AJRF 6y ago
  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)

focus2020 6y ago

There is another Emacs package "pdftools" which is very underrated. It's amazing package, and just like org-mode pdftools will also be useful for the next several decades

jonathanstrange 6y ago

Whenever there's an Emacs thread I feel really bad like an impostor, because I'm using Emacs daily for work and hobby for the past 15 years now and still only use only 5 to 10 functions regularly. Heck, I can't even remember the keyboard combo for getting help about a mode. When I have to install a new package, I use Melpa and copy&paste init code for the .emacs file from the web. If it doesn't work or breaks, I usually just use another package because it's too hard to fix the error. My .emacs file is a total mess and I have no idea what 50% of the code in it is doing. Do I need it or should I comment it out? I don't know. Two years ago I tried to start using org mode and bought the printed org mode book but it just turned out to be too complicated and too much time to adapt all the publishing settings for me to be of any use. For a while I used a Bibtex tool which was weird to use, and now I'm using KBibtex again. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Emacs is a great editor but I wish someone made an AI-powered assistant called "clippy" for it that makes suggestions for commands one might use when working in Emacs. I just can't remember all those keyboard shortcuts for every mode.

neutronicus 6y ago
Look into Spacemacs - it addresses a lot of what you want. It understands file extensions and automatically downloads curated sets of packages for what you're editing (no more arcane copying and pasting) The key bindings are set up so that pressing the first part of a key chord brings up all the things the next part of the key chord could be in the mini buffer
O_H_E 6y ago
Yeah, I firmly believe more software should be built on top of emacs to leverage its power and expressiveness behind a dicoverable interface for people who are too busy or have a life.
taude 6y ago
Sounds like the package which-key [1] might help you out. (It comes pre-configured for those who use Doom Emacs, but I was using it in my personal config for awhile.). From the about: which-key is a minor mode for Emacs that displays the key bindings following your currently entered incomplete command (a prefix) in a popup. [1] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

devnullbyte 6y ago

I have had a few stints of trying out emacs. I used spacemacs, doom and rolled my own. It never gained any traction for me. I think the reason for this, is that the amount of time I would put into memorizing all the shortcuts and control / meta combinations, setting up all the lisp plugins (and then remembering their control key / meta combinations) is just not worth it for the time lost setting up and learning for the productivity gained. I am better to just use an IDE with all its bells and whistles and for general terminal work my old simple VIM set up easily does the job. As far as org-mode, meh. I really don't see whats so amazing about collapsible to-do notes anymore. As for email, listening to music etc, I am sorry, but browsers do that job very well and with zero time needed to scour around blogs trying to get them to work.

ashton314 6y ago

I was but a wee lad of seven years when my father took me to a closet in our family office/craft room space and gave me a login to a FreeBSD machine running there. He showed me how to use Emacs and mutt—I sent my first email via a TUI. It's been almost two decades since then, and I still use Emacs every day. I only recently got into org-mode. Boy was I missing out. I felt like a wizard compared to my classmates and peers, but now I feel like I've seriously leveled up. What motivated me to learn how to use org-mode was a nice solution that worked on mobile. My favorite org-mode client for mobile is beorg [1]. (No relation to the app, other than a happy customer.) For general note files, I generally use Working Copy. If you'd like to get into org-mode but are held back by the experience on mobile, give beorg a try. You will thank yourself. [1]: https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/

drivers99 6y ago

> The unwieldy part came with all the repeated tasks, and tasks that got carried over from one day to the next (or didn't get finished). I had to copy yesterday's file, change all the key info, sort out the todo list, erase yesterday's journal, and generally do far too much work to keep my journal up. I have that problem with my systems. I was hoping he would explain the solution specifically.