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Comment by biomene | Hacker News Reader

I've tried to use org mode several times. Its functionality is truly great, but having to use emacs to use it is too much of a hurdle for me. I struggle to remember all the emacs key combinations, so in the end I just give up and revert to text files.

It would be great if someone ported org mode out of emacs. I've tried the Sublime Text org mode package[0] but it's still too bare to be useful. Does anyone know of an alternative way to use it?

[0]: https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode

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Are you more of a vim person? If so, spacemacs might be something to use. Sure, it is slow and buggy in some rarely-used layers, but other than that it is a really neat experience. The org mode layer sees quite some love, and works well.

I tried spacemacs for a month, but the problem is reading vim guides doesn't quite work, reading emacs guides doesn't quite work, and there isn't good enough spacemacs documentation.

You can try evil-mode which is just the vi interface, Spacemacs is more of a packaged solution that happens to include the vi interface. Having used vi interfaces in other editors (VS, IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, Atom, Sublime, VSCode, etc.), based on my experiences, evil gives the most accurate vim experience.

The other editors don't have modes in the same way the emacs does though. What I find frustrating is if your in the package manager mode for example, then your keybindings break.

Spacemacs improves this for some modes, but it still won't allow custom bindings in any/most of them.

For this reason, I found it much easier to get started with Emacs and manually including evil mode in my configuration.

I used spacemacs for a while just so I could use Org mode. But I just couldn't adapt to it. I love Vim in the console, and the Spacemacs experience is just different enough that it didn't gel with how I work.

If you're a vim person, there is vimwiki... it's not the same as orgmode (I believe, never having tried it), but it's not bad.

What is it about org-mode that you find attractive? For me org-mode is inseparable from emacs. I find it hard to imagine what you'd be looking for in another editor and how it would work.

You can write an org file manually using any editor. Org-mode just provides a lot of tools to make this easier and more efficient. How would these tools look in another environment? Lots of GUI buttons?

It really does seem inseparable from emacs. I've not seen another system come close to matching the power of orgmode in any other editor, and I'm beginning to think it won't happen.

there is a vim plugin for org-mode (VimOrganizer)

I use org mode, and thought it would be a gentle way of establishing some familiarity with emacs. But whenever I want to do anything other than the slightest edits to my todo files I open the file in vim! Emacs just has no built in functionality, everything has to be implemented. It's like raising a baby - teach it eat, drink, crawl. Eventually it will be somewhat capable, but then I can't simply fire it up on another machine. Maybe I'm missing something, but every time I look up the simplest edit, I'm presented with 30 lines of code. Maybe the gentle approach is not the way to get going with emacs. Anyway, point being I'm also looking for a vim alternative.

> Emacs just has no built in functionality, everything has to be implemented. It's like raising a baby - teach it eat, drink, crawl.

Sorry if I seem negative but it looks like you only scratched the surface of a vanilla Emacs install and gave up shortly afterwards.

Most functionality in Emacs comes in 3rd-party packages. Configuring Emacs is for the most part an integration job (and if you're using Prelude or Spacemacs, this is all done for you by the community.)

I do agree Emacs can be daunting at first, its a vast ecosystem on top of an alien VM, but learning it is well worth the time spent!

You're not being negative at all. I've no doubt I've only scratched the surface. I'll eventually put aside some time to do some of the config.

How about Spacemacs? It has Vim bindings (by default), comes with a very reasonable set of plugins for generic tasks, and has bundles available for most languages.

Sounds like something I'll have to look at.

Emacs is definitely more of a platform you can build your own editor on, choose whichever parts you like and then you get an editor perfect for your needs.

Vim is more of an integrated "this is what you get and it's this way or the highway" sort of deal. Of course there's some extensibility but nowhere near to the same degree.

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