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Org mode and everything Emacs has a crazy steep learning curve. I tried using Org for note-taking with formulas, and I remember having to learn a ton of arcane

Org mode and everything Emacs has a crazy steep learning curve. I tried using Org for note-taking with formulas, and I remember having to learn a ton of arcane things like Doom Emacs and endless keyboard bindings (Org + Emacs + Vi). I then just switched back to something easy, where I could fluently get my thoughts down without wasting endless time. Maybe I should give it another go with Spacemacs because I like the idea of Org mode. That might make the learning curve gentler. I hadn't considered that possibility at the time. I don't understand why Emacs's features aren't exposed via context menus. You can always switch to the keyboard later as you get good.

dangom 5y ago
Context-menus will land in the next Emacs release and are already available on master. Expect more and more functionality to be exposed via them. Being emacs, context-menus will also be configurable. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/etc/NEWS#L227 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/etc/NEWS... https://ruzkuku.com/texts/emacs-mouse.html https://ruzkuku.com/texts/emacs-mouse.html
funklute 5y ago
You can activate a menu, but it only covers very basic things. If you are confined to using only the menu, you might equally well use notepad. For base emacs, the learning curve is not as steep as vim. I wonder if your problem was trying to do everything at once? Regardless, emacs really is more of a long-term investment. It will take you years to be fully proficient. Personally, I have gone away from using emacs (including org-mode and vim emulation), because it took too much time to keep the configuration shiny. My main issue with org-mode is that it's only really a first class citizen within emacs. I've not found any vim/vscode/etc. plugins that emulates the experience to satisfactory degree, and that lock-in means I've given up on org-mode.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
The learning curve is steep, that is true. I guess one has to invest some learning to get the good stuff. I myself needed 2 attempts at getting into Emacs. One very short one, where I found myself struggling with even saving a buffer, that ended quickly. The other one more serious, investing my free time out of curiosity, what all the Emacs fuss is about. At some later point I discovered org mode and from then on, there was simply no way back for me to something less. Similar for Magit. Or running shells inside Emacs and being able to simply copy anything from a shell buffer, because it is a buffer and not some readonly thingy in a separate window. Very useful. Now I use org mode almost every day and definitely for all kinds of documentation and notes. It might not be perfect out of the box for formula rendering, but even that can be arranged/configured, so that you can switch to rendered formulas inside your buffer and I have done so in the past. I have not tried to use Doom Emacs or Spacemacs or whatever flavour. I started with standard Emacs and went with that and still use that. If Doom Emacs or Spacemacs introduce too many new concepts or make the learning curve too steep, perhaps trying standard Emacs will be a better experience. Not sure what use context menus would have in my personal workflow. Perhaps if they could be opened via keyboard shortcut and then I could select menu items quickly, it would be useful.
R0flcopt3r 5y ago
Emacs has menu bars, tool bars and context menus ootb. Even scrollbars. Most Emacs users disable it. Simply run M-x menu-bar-mode, or add (menu-bar-mode 1) into your init.el or config.el Same syntax for tool-bar-mode. Context menu is ootb for me with doom emacs, so that should just work.
User23 5y ago
There’s some work in this space, such as Nicolas Rougier’s promising notebook-mode[1]. I’m convinced there would be an audience for an OrgBook app that philosophically treated Emacs as an implementation detail. Give it more familiar keybindings, some out of the box nice looking themes, and configure the new context menu functionality as you suggest. Then package it up as something that can be run and installed with or without an existing Emacs. It’s hard to imagine experienced Emacsers wanting to lead a project that solves a problem they don’t have, but the community is very friendly so whoever took it on would get plenty of help. [1] https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode
brudgers 5y ago
I don't understand why Emacs's features aren't exposed via context menus Mainly I think it is a matter of efficiency...on the implementation side. I mean the hard part about learning something like org-mode (or emacs itself) is conceptual not key bindings. It's this way because org-mode (or emacs itself) is a powerful tool that users use for decades. The tooling is intended to reward expertise and experience. No amount of context menus will change the fact that the tools are deep and conceptual mastery will take more than a few hours (never mind the thirty seconds the typical app has to engage the user). Org-mode was written for it's author's use. It was written to get things done. Easy onboarding and massive investment in graphical UI for non-experts wouldn't do that. It requires work to learn. That's true of anything hard. It's not that I don't sympathize...though it probably can be interpreted that way. It's that using emacs (and org-mode) is analogous to playing the piano, not playing the stereo. Finally, I while I get the appeal of things like spacemacs, I think it's mostly a distraction. The documentation and tooling is by it's nature derivative...it is by it's nature extra work. Even worse it's extra work that's driven by ideology. Worser still, it's extra work driven by the ideology of Vim versus Emacs. And worst of all, it's rational is emacs-is-too-hard-to-learn. Emacs is hard to learn, but not too hard. It's harder to learn than a sixteen week college course. But that's most things in the working world.

dangom 5y ago

Context-menus will land in the next Emacs release and are already available on master. Expect more and more functionality to be exposed via them. Being emacs, context-menus will also be configurable. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/etc/NEWS#L227 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/etc/NEWS... https://ruzkuku.com/texts/emacs-mouse.html https://ruzkuku.com/texts/emacs-mouse.html

funklute 5y ago

You can activate a menu, but it only covers very basic things. If you are confined to using only the menu, you might equally well use notepad. For base emacs, the learning curve is not as steep as vim. I wonder if your problem was trying to do everything at once? Regardless, emacs really is more of a long-term investment. It will take you years to be fully proficient. Personally, I have gone away from using emacs (including org-mode and vim emulation), because it took too much time to keep the configuration shiny. My main issue with org-mode is that it's only really a first class citizen within emacs. I've not found any vim/vscode/etc. plugins that emulates the experience to satisfactory degree, and that lock-in means I've given up on org-mode.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

The learning curve is steep, that is true. I guess one has to invest some learning to get the good stuff. I myself needed 2 attempts at getting into Emacs. One very short one, where I found myself struggling with even saving a buffer, that ended quickly. The other one more serious, investing my free time out of curiosity, what all the Emacs fuss is about. At some later point I discovered org mode and from then on, there was simply no way back for me to something less. Similar for Magit. Or running shells inside Emacs and being able to simply copy anything from a shell buffer, because it is a buffer and not some readonly thingy in a separate window. Very useful. Now I use org mode almost every day and definitely for all kinds of documentation and notes. It might not be perfect out of the box for formula rendering, but even that can be arranged/configured, so that you can switch to rendered formulas inside your buffer and I have done so in the past. I have not tried to use Doom Emacs or Spacemacs or whatever flavour. I started with standard Emacs and went with that and still use that. If Doom Emacs or Spacemacs introduce too many new concepts or make the learning curve too steep, perhaps trying standard Emacs will be a better experience. Not sure what use context menus would have in my personal workflow. Perhaps if they could be opened via keyboard shortcut and then I could select menu items quickly, it would be useful.

R0flcopt3r 5y ago

Emacs has menu bars, tool bars and context menus ootb. Even scrollbars. Most Emacs users disable it. Simply run M-x menu-bar-mode, or add (menu-bar-mode 1) into your init.el or config.el Same syntax for tool-bar-mode. Context menu is ootb for me with doom emacs, so that should just work.

User23 5y ago

There’s some work in this space, such as Nicolas Rougier’s promising notebook-mode[1]. I’m convinced there would be an audience for an OrgBook app that philosophically treated Emacs as an implementation detail. Give it more familiar keybindings, some out of the box nice looking themes, and configure the new context menu functionality as you suggest. Then package it up as something that can be run and installed with or without an existing Emacs. It’s hard to imagine experienced Emacsers wanting to lead a project that solves a problem they don’t have, but the community is very friendly so whoever took it on would get plenty of help. [1] https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode

brudgers 5y ago

I don't understand why Emacs's features aren't exposed via context menus Mainly I think it is a matter of efficiency...on the implementation side. I mean the hard part about learning something like org-mode (or emacs itself) is conceptual not key bindings. It's this way because org-mode (or emacs itself) is a powerful tool that users use for decades. The tooling is intended to reward expertise and experience. No amount of context menus will change the fact that the tools are deep and conceptual mastery will take more than a few hours (never mind the thirty seconds the typical app has to engage the user). Org-mode was written for it's author's use. It was written to get things done. Easy onboarding and massive investment in graphical UI for non-experts wouldn't do that. It requires work to learn. That's true of anything hard. It's not that I don't sympathize...though it probably can be interpreted that way. It's that using emacs (and org-mode) is analogous to playing the piano, not playing the stereo. Finally, I while I get the appeal of things like spacemacs, I think it's mostly a distraction. The documentation and tooling is by it's nature derivative...it is by it's nature extra work. Even worse it's extra work that's driven by ideology. Worser still, it's extra work driven by the ideology of Vim versus Emacs. And worst of all, it's rational is emacs-is-too-hard-to-learn. Emacs is hard to learn, but not too hard. It's harder to learn than a sixteen week college course. But that's most things in the working world.