I actually don’t like the text that I am working on to look like a refined press article in a magazine, a beautifully typeset page from a book or a nice looking website. It is not a published text. It should look rough, unfinished, unrefined and functional (to me). When I write on a piece of paper, my handwriting looks ugly, irregular, misaligned and maybe there are some drops of ink splattered around, so I don’t want my editor to make me believe that my writing looks presentable.
For Org Mode, my main concern is that I want to quickly identify the structure of my documents and differentiate all the relevant parts visually. I like to keep font sizes and spacings small to fit as much text (= context) on my screen as possible. I also like using monospace fonts because it feels more like working on a draft (e.g. with a typewriter) to me and I can work more spatially with text (e.g. making little diagrams or figurative text arrangements) which would not be possible with proportional fonts.
When everything looks too good/refined, I get distracted by wanting to shape my text to make it fit in that perfect environment. Then there is no space for swift notes, unfinished drafts, rough edges and this becomes a problem, since I am already a compulsive perfectionist and like to waste a lot of time with irrelevant details. Of course, this is just my personal preference, so I am not saying that this is how it should be. Maybe I am just trying to understand why I like it better this way.
I wrote exactly the same thing before reading your comment. I completely agree. For me one of the great things about writing in Emacs is the distinction about my personal draft and my published outuput, which is expressed by the distinction between a 'typewriter' fixed-width font and a beautiful LaTeX processed output. Blurring that distinction produces an anxiety.
Two things though. I think org-mode syntax is not the most ergonomic and beautiful. In facts, that's the reason I stick more to Markdown when writing. Second, the problem I see here is that they want to change the source text into a formatted one. Basically introducing WYSIWYG from behind through the knee, but the source is still plain text. Can be done, but comes with challenges and side-effects (there is a reason Enriched Text[^1] never took off - although Richard Stallmann still dreams to have more WYSIWYG capabilities in Emacs)
I think this misses the point of org-mode. Markdown is even one of its outputs. Org-mode lets you write in an environment that is aware of the semantic meaning and structure of your content, from headlines, latex, diagrams and lists to blocks that can execute code or make web requests, tables that can have spreadsheet calculations not to mention the time tracking features.
I can understand wanting a simpler text format to focus on writing, but there are many editing tasks such as writing a blog or making project and study notes that really benefit from a more capable environment.
It's also very opinionated about that structure, to the extent that it'll get in the way of WYSIWYG'ing the content.
I've driven myself half-mad just saying "These two outline blocks are too close together" and adding some newlines only to have the header-collapse hide those newlines and squash the two outline headers back together.
What do you use for writing markdown? Any recommendations?
I use org mode very lightly, mostly just collapsing information I don’t want care about as I’m writing and making formatted tables. I’ve thought about exploring markdown and other editors but I haven’t really seen evidence it would be much of a gain.
My main authoring tool is then Emacs Markdown Mode (https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/). For data entry, it comes with some bells and whistles similar to org-mode, like C-c C-l for inserting links etc.
I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.
I'm curious what makes you consider it non-ergonomic? For the things both support, I don't remember that many differences. Org shines, though, for all of the other things it also supports. In a real sense, it is more in the same realm as jupyter than it is markdown.
I think org-mode has several fairly orthogonal use cases, including literate programming (your Jupyter reference), outlining, markup, task management, spreadsheets, and many more. And the community has done an amazing job of implementing all of these really well, each for itself, while still maintaining a working ecosystem. But I only use a small subset of that when I use org mode. The amount of metadata that needs to be included in a full-blown org-mode document seems to be increasing, and I feel more and more like I am writing a specification with verbose syntax (and personally, I find "#+BEGIN ... #+END" blocks or similar keywords unappealing).
I think that's really the key thing, and I didn't realize it until only recently: org-mode fits a Jupyter mental model better than a Markdown (or outliner, etc.) mental model.
It's great for what it is, but what it is doesn't 1-to-1 map to much else.
> I think org-mode syntax is not the most ergonomic and beautiful.
Which parts about it? I actually agree with the sentiment, to my taste there are some aspects of org-mode which are better than Markdown, and some which are worse, and on balance Markdown wins the contest.
I have a project which is attempting to meld the benefits of both, so I'm interested in what you see as org-mode's pain points.
I'd advise not worrying about the benefits others see to either, if you are wanting to meld them. Instead, meld the parts that you like above and beyond anything else.
My reasoning is that the main advantage of Markdown is the crowd using it. It is not an unknown quantity to a lot of folks. Similarly, the biggest "pro" of org-mode is that it has all of the power of emacs. Which, is oddly its biggest con to the crowd that doesn't like it.
Any recommendation on how to get started with emacs? I tried it a few years ago and was so hard to use it, after that I switched to nvim, but now I have interest in learning emacs again.
The built in tutorial followed by a couple of weeks of forcing yourself to use it for basic editing tasks until you find yourself comfortable again. Don’t try to recreate a full IDE experience at first. Try to walk before you run. The beauty of emacs comes from discovering that it solves problems you didn’t know you had rather than being a drop in for your current IDE.
Thanks, great advice, I would say it was my mistake before, I wanted to configure everything how I wanted and the information was overwhelming, plus the learning curve.
Emacs 29 made getting started a lot easier IMO, my from-scratch configuration is pretty minimal and I use it everyday. To plug my own project, I built a "kickstart" equivalent (https://github.com/mgmarlow/start-emacs) that sets up some recommended defaults and packages with lots of comments so you can easily extend it.
Many configuration-ish things that were hard a few years ago are now way easier. with emacs 29+. There's way fewer reason to reach for doomemacs etc now because package management, configuring LSP mode, etc is much cleaner these days.
In some ways working through setting up your .emacs the way you want it is a great way to learn the tool.
Agreed. It's gotten easier. If I was starting Emacs from scratch again, I'd probably write my own vanilla config. But Doom helped introduce me when the concept was bizarre and foreign to me, and I'm very grateful for that. Now I'm comfortable with my Doom config, and it works great, so I have little incentive to ditch it.
I loved working with org mode - but I would occasionally hit some accidental key sequence which would totally blow up my entire document (I am not an eMacs expert so it was probably some vim mode problem)! I also probably tried to over organize things. Maybe with a simpler setup things would work better.
If you're using evil or something similar, I would say that's probably the culprit. Writing in org mode using vanilla emacs should have about the same "surprise" as writing in Notepad. If you have speedkeys enabled (which I doubt is the default), then yes - certain keys at certain positions will cause surprising behavior.
This is why I like nano. Easily the simplest editor out there that actually feels like modern command line software and not something vestigial from the 1980s. All I need is syntax highlighting anyhow and nano checks that box after a git pull of someone elses hard work making those rules for every file format under the sun.
Readit News
For Org Mode, my main concern is that I want to quickly identify the structure of my documents and differentiate all the relevant parts visually. I like to keep font sizes and spacings small to fit as much text (= context) on my screen as possible. I also like using monospace fonts because it feels more like working on a draft (e.g. with a typewriter) to me and I can work more spatially with text (e.g. making little diagrams or figurative text arrangements) which would not be possible with proportional fonts.
When everything looks too good/refined, I get distracted by wanting to shape my text to make it fit in that perfect environment. Then there is no space for swift notes, unfinished drafts, rough edges and this becomes a problem, since I am already a compulsive perfectionist and like to waste a lot of time with irrelevant details. Of course, this is just my personal preference, so I am not saying that this is how it should be. Maybe I am just trying to understand why I like it better this way.
https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode
https://twitter.com/NPRougier/status/1576635498264760325/pho...
https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030
I remember liking "elegance" at the time[0] by the same author.
[0]: https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs
I really want to mess with this, but I have zero time for yak shaving right now. Too many deliverables for this week :/
But if you have zero time for yak shaving I wouldn't try it anyways :)
[^1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/En...
I've driven myself half-mad just saying "These two outline blocks are too close together" and adding some newlines only to have the header-collapse hide those newlines and squash the two outline headers back together.
I use org mode very lightly, mostly just collapsing information I don’t want care about as I’m writing and making formatted tables. I’ve thought about exploring markdown and other editors but I haven’t really seen evidence it would be much of a gain.
I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.
It's great for what it is, but what it is doesn't 1-to-1 map to much else.
Which parts about it? I actually agree with the sentiment, to my taste there are some aspects of org-mode which are better than Markdown, and some which are worse, and on balance Markdown wins the contest.
I have a project which is attempting to meld the benefits of both, so I'm interested in what you see as org-mode's pain points.
My reasoning is that the main advantage of Markdown is the crowd using it. It is not an unknown quantity to a lot of folks. Similarly, the biggest "pro" of org-mode is that it has all of the power of emacs. Which, is oddly its biggest con to the crowd that doesn't like it.
In some ways working through setting up your .emacs the way you want it is a great way to learn the tool.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw
Try using that config 25% of your work/productive time for 1 month.
Then if you are annoyed by how much time it takes try using doomemacs for the same 25% time.
At the end of this you'll know if/which emacs approach is for you.
https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods
1. go through the entire built-in tutorial (which it will prompt you about on first load)
2. just adopt doomemacs or spacemacs, which are very large complicated default configs that are easier for vim users to start with
I can use basic vi, have for a long time, but can never make sense of Emacs and probably my impatience doesn’t lend well to reading and trying..
https://www.youtube.com/@SystemCrafters
https://www.youtube.com/@GavinFreeborn
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Not what I need for todos, but a nice "book view".