Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnw_hazor | Hacker News Reader

I had been away from emacs for almost 10 years since I stopped being a pro programmer. And even back then I wasn't really an emacs power-user. I just knew enough to be productive and slightly dangerous.

Recently, I reached my last nerve with MS Word and buckled down to ditch Word for emacs.

Today I do just about all my writing in emacs (markdown) and then generate word docx using pandoc at the end. Now, I use emacs all day everyday -- blessed. And I am more productive especially since I am actively pushing to keep increasing my power-user level.

View on HN

You should check out org: https://orgmode.org/

Writing markdown with emacs is a huge step up. Now you get to take another big step up when you use org-mode instead of markdown. I'm actually pretty envious.

I use org-mode for note taking and some task tracking. My main doc writing setup is more like an ide setup.

markdown<->docx with pandoc lets me use a ref-doc.docx file that ensures all the styling I need for legal docs gets into the word doc. So you make a markdown file from the ref-doc.docx then edit the markdown file and convert to docx using the same ref-doc and everything in docx has the correct style, and stuff like line numbers and headers are preserved. Pretty sweet.

Yeah, I've done that with pandoc too, but I use org-mode. It's much more pleasurable to write than markdown. I don't use a great deal of org-mode features when writing, I suppose, but just being able to fold up sections and knowing the keys to quickly jump between them and rearrange them is great.

I use org-mode for todo items, but haven't been using emacs for long.

What does org-mode do with writing documents that is better than Markdown?

For one example that I like to cite, install Org-Babel and play around with a Jupyter-notebook-esque interface within your document. When you’re done, GitHub will render it statically like they do Markdown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com