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Comment by Crontab | Hacker News Reader

I've tried org-mode, and Emacs, several times. I even bought a copy of Mastering Emacs Mickey Petersen. But I just don't care for Emacs and I suspect that there are other people who feel the same way.

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This argument is really important actually. The design pattern to separate the data from the application solves it. And org-mode has done that in a way as the data is in text-files. But it's not marketed like that. We should really see org-mode as two parts:

- Org-mode data format

- Software implementation that understands the data

  - Emacs

  - ...

The syntax is very well thought out as well. Specification here: (https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html)

Maybe it's a bit late to hope for wide software adoption for the org-syntax. Markdown has in a way taken that space already. But... I'm still hoping! ;)

I'd love org syntax to be more widely adopted, but it probably isn't going to happen. That's because org syntax, without org mode, is just slightly better Markdown. That's not very impressive.

Org mode has so many fans because of what the implementation (i.e. org-mode in Emacs) can do with those files. It works as an awesome ASCII table editor. It works as a half-decent spreadsheet. It works as a great planner. It works as a better version of Jupyter. And couple other things.

Noteplan seems to separate data from application as well. All files are stored in plain text

I'm one of those people, I get why it's great in theory but in practice every thing about it puts me off, the commands all feel weird (again I understand why - I'm aware of the history), the documentation is lack luster in places, the whole thing just feels off.

I'm the same with vim (and against I get why people love it).

Most all of my programming is done in an IDE and when I just want an editor (markdown usually) I tend to use vscode (I use it when I have a lot of frontend stuff to do as well, it's TS mode is better than Intellij's).

I feel almost the same, although after trying to force vim on myself for a week I found that I missed the basic motion commands (moving across words and lines, deleting words and lines, etc.). It does feel faster to not have to move my right hand to somewhere else to move around in my code. Fortunately just about every modern IDE and editor has some kind of vim emulation so I can get the best of both worlds!

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