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Comment by Ruud-v-A | Hacker News Reader

What features does Emacs have for editing Org-mode that makes the combo so great?

It really knows the elements as objects. So it can interact with them. E.g. it recognizes dates and creates a calendar like Google Calendar for you. You can also move subtrees in linked lists around, only show certain layers etc. You can turn a list element into a TODO, change it's TODO status, and even log the time you took for a TODO element. But all of that becomes much harder with bash and friends.

Do you know Powershell? It feels similar to me. You interact with objects instead of strings. That's also why string manipulation tools don't feel so great with org mode files. You cannot grab an org mode object as easily as a line or a paragraph with tools optimized for string manipulation.

I see, thank you for the explanation. I know the concept of Powershell but I haven’t really used it.

I would add that its not just that you can interact with different objects in the markup, but that there's a huge collection of operations built into Org-mode on emacs that does interact with them this way. You don't need to write code to interact with the org markdown; you just use the already written org features.

For example, the ability to search a file or set of files and collect responsive org heading items in a separate "Agenda" buffer is hugely empowering for a lot of different uses. Org-mode on emacs has both very broad and very deep functionality.

It's not necessarily easy to learn, but you can ignore the more complicated stuff if you want, just use the very simple basics and remain ignorant of the much deeper functionality that's there for people who want to make use of it. Or, better, start simple and learn more complex bits and pieces as you go; there's an active and friendly org community that helps with that.

Piles and piles of automatic formatting, for one. Working with tables in org-mode is really nice. That an emacs lisp means you can customize various parts to your liking. I used to have a snippet that would assign ids to elements automatically. I can also customize export, etc.

And, of course, like someone mentioned, being able to interact with your document almost like it's a proper data set that you can manipulate programatically.

Oh I don't know, the eponymous major mode?

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