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Beginning to see the light with org-mode
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Posted by zoe
Dec 22, 2015 at 09:58 PM
shatteredmindofbob wrote:
Throughout learning Emacs and Org-Mode, I’ve come across a *lot* of
>people evangelizing Spacemacs, but if I’ve never used Vim, what exactly
>does it offer me?
>
>(That’s not entirely accurate, through my experience went something like
>“How do I type text? Insert mode? What YEAR is it?!? Wait..HOW DO I
>CLOSE THIS THING?!?” )
>
>I’m really not sure what it does other than add even *more* weird
>keybindings. I mean, vanilla Emacs has a lot of ridiculous key-bindings
>but how is “SPC h d f” better than “Ctrl-h k”?
>
>This is why I personally don’t care for these “starter packs.” They
>really don’t seem friendly to someone who is starting out in Emacs.
Different approaches for different people, I suppose. For what it’s worth, I agree with you that it’s better for a complete newbie to learn some sort of “orthodox” emacs, if only because a lot of the add-ons and modes that make emacs powerful are built on the assumption that you’re running a non-Spacemacs/Ergo-emacs build. People do rave about Spacemacs, but those folks are often already experienced programmers (if they’re used to vim, they’re probably on the geekier side to begin with) who might know better how to troubleshoot when things don’t work quite right.
If you start from square 1 on plain emacs, it makes it easier to Google for help.
Posted by Prion
Dec 22, 2015 at 10:16 PM
A matter of personal preference I would say.
I am a newbie and not a programmer and to me it felt that emacs was hobbled together over decades whereas spacemacs tries to introduce one consistent approach, bundling together topically related keystrokes.
The keystrokes are not necessarily shorter (a lot of them are) but they make more sense. Anything beginning with SPC h relates to “help”, SPC b relates to “buffer” and so on, only to be specified further by adding more keys. The main difference to pure emacs is that you always get feedback that offers the next choices, so if for example you have typed SPC b you are offered a choice of single keystrokes with explanations that spell out what you actually could do to the buffer. I find it a lot easier to discover as you go.
It works for me it seems, so I for one would disagree with a strict division pure emacs for the newbies, spacemacs for the geeks. In fact, I’d say, whilst spacemacs has enough power for the geekier programmers, it’s the newbies like me who benefit most from the new take that spacemacs offers.
If emacs works for you, great, but it did not click with me.
Posted by Prion
Dec 23, 2015 at 08:42 AM
Just two more things:
1) If Vim editing style using SPC as a leader key is enabled, the original emacs shortcuts still work as well so if “C-h k” is already engrained in your memory you don’t have to learn “SPC hdk” or reconfigure the keybindings, they work in parallel.
2) If emacs editing style is preferred this is the other mode in which spacemacs can be run, called holy mode (as opposed to evil mode) and feels just like emacs because it is emacs.
You’d still have the advantage of a starter package that has been put together by knowledgeable people and the forward discoverability afforded by helm etc.
But whatever works, perhaps let’s return to the subject of org mode.
Posted by jaslar
Dec 24, 2015 at 07:04 AM
Prion, many thanks. I don’t know if I’ll investigate SPACEMACS or not, but you certainly put up some thought-provoking defenses, and I did a little follow-up reading that was most interesting. I appreciate your thoughts.
For me, today, I like the “modeless” operation of emacs org-mode and markdown-mode. I’m using both of them about evenly. As is true of most things, the more time you put into something, the more sensible it seems. But I certainly accept that there is more than one way to approach the tasks of organization and writing.
In just the past couple of days I have discovered “abbrev-mode” (auto-replace shortcuts with longer phrases, as in TextExpander), “wc-mode” (put a constantly updated word count at the bottom of the screen), “org-indent-mode” (shift things to show the structure of a document by auto-indentation), and “#+STARTUP: odd” (which, when placed as the first line of a file, bumps org-indent-mode to make it even MORE obvious). All of these just add to both org-mode and markdown-mode, enhancing what seems to be an always more productive environment.
I guess that means I’m settling in.
But just as a contrary note, I want to give a shout-out to Notecase Pro, a TWO-pane outliner whose capabilities continue to evolve. For instance, it is now possible to output an outline to markdown. And various LUA scripts are available to do many other things. I’m doing a lot of cool things with emacs lately, but Notecase Pro does them, too, just in a different way. And without so much effort!
As others have noted, we don’t actually need to have just one solution, right? We can play with several, because each of them offers something the others do not. The trick is to devise a workflow that matches the idiosyncrasies of our unique personalities, and the challenges of the moment. Having said that, I like emacs more and more.
Posted by Marbux
Dec 24, 2015 at 08:35 PM
jaslar wrote:
>But just as a contrary note, I want to give a shout-out to Notecase Pro,
>a TWO-pane outliner whose capabilities continue to evolve. For instance,
>it is now possible to output an outline to markdown. And various LUA
>scripts are available to do many other things. I’m doing a lot of cool
>things with emacs lately, but Notecase Pro does them, too, just in a
>different way. And without so much effort!
If you’ve discovered the joys of extending NoteCase Pro with Lua scripts, you might be interested in a draft plugin I have in the works that’s usable now. It has somewhat over 200 scripted extensions for NC Pro; all scripts run on all operating systems NoteCase Pro supports. Most of the scripts are finished (the ones that don’t have an “x” at the beginning of their titles). All of the scripts are accessible through a pop-up hierarchical menu. From the menu, you can also hit the Help button instead of launching the script, which extracts the script’s documentation and displays it in your system’s default web browser. For the most part these are scripts I’ve written but also a few by Daniel Hertrich and several by NoteCase Pro’s author, Miro Rajcic.
If you’d like me to send you a copy, please send me an email at marbux pine @ maple gmail.com (subtract the trees).
The menu’s main categories will give you a glimmer of the types of scripts:
Editing Menu
* Note Pane Actions
* Tree Actions
* Note Tag Actions
* Note Title Actions
* Note Property Actions
Clipboard Actions Menu
Event-Driven Scripts
GUI Actions Menu
Hyperlinks Menu
* Copy Links
Lists & NoteGroups Menu
* Pick NoteGroup to List Menu
* Process Listed Notes Menu
Miscellaneous Scripts Menu
Scripting Aids Menu
* Copy Actions
* Debugging
* Event-Driven Scripting Aids
* List Actions
* Lua Module Searcher Paths
* Replace Actions
* Script Launcher Menu Construction
* Scripting Resources
Shipping Scripts Menu
* Documents & Files
* Editing Notes
* Encryption
* Hyperlinks
* Icons
* Internet
* Listed Notes
* Note Flags
* Scripting Aids
* Tag-Related
Utilities
The List & NoteGroups branch presently allows selection from 40 different types of notegroups to list and has 41 scripts for applying different bulk processing to a list once assembled. The latter are not dependent on lists created using the scripts. They will work on any group of listed notes, whether the notegroup was created by script, by clicking on a tag, by filling a search to the List Pane, whatever.
Best regards,
Paul