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Comment by cjauvin | Hacker News Reader

One related thing that I began to do a while ago is to always have a `<project>.org` file going along any of my projects, which is a free-form Org-Mode journal of all the things and ideas related to that project, including of course esoteric commands for certain things (which sometimes can be hard to find in my bash history). With Org-Mode it's easy to fluidly change the structure of this journal, which makes it a very powerful tool.

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When I was working on a NASA project in university, one of my colleagues would always preach the virtues of org mode; as a person whose brain now thinks in vim, is it worth learning emacs just for this tool?

I was where you are about a month ago. I ended up using Doom[0] as a bootstrapped config and haven't looked back.

I love org-mode. It's the killer feature of Emacs in my mind. I also feel like (note, this is entirely anecdotal and not based on hard facts) Emacs has better LSP integration than Vim. I mainly use Go, so it could also be that gopls has become more stable than it was a year ago when I was first trying to get Vim working with it.

[0]: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

vim vs emacs thing is extremely outdated imho. There is evil-mode (Emacs VIm Layer) in emacs which is an emulator of vim. You can have vim, or emacs, or both, or none, all being equally viable. In fact, there is Spacemacs which is an emacs distro that is built around evil-mode and comes with a whole bunch of packages out-of-the-box.

https://www.spacemacs.org/

This is not to preach of emacs or vim, really. I'm just saying vim and emacs are by no means mutually exclusive. I personally never got used to vim stuff, so I use Spacemacs with emacs keybindings, and my custom elisp scripts. Emacs really is more of a programming environment/mini operating system than an editor. Enjoy!

I couldn't agree more. Emacs is a text-mode Lisp VM, whereas Vi is a modal editing UI. They are in different categories.

Emacs has a great Vi implementation, Spacemacs. Neovim is also a good Vi implementation. Vim, I think, is a bit outdated. For example, VimL scripting is full of quirks.

Not op, but yes org-mode is worth it.

As a vim user, my recommendation is to skip spacemacs, and go for straight emacs (with evil mode if you like modal editing, i do)

I liked Uncle Dave's Tutorial series on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDEtZ7AKmwS0_GNJog01D2g/vid...

Start with his emacs tutorial, it is mostly learn emacs and org mode as you learn to setup emacs.

Why skip spacemacs? I've been in this mentality since early 2010s and I've been maintaining my own N k line of elisp script for ~15 years. Last year I installed spacemacs and TBH although not everything is exactly how I want, it's refreshing not to maintain my own OS to be able to code. Spacemacs still makes some things harder but overall I prefer it to building everything yourself from ground. Anyway, just my opinion. You can always customize Spacemacs too, of course it's gonna be more complex than vanilla emacs.

Some of the first advice I was given when starting to learn emacs, was learn vanilla first then try doom or spacemacs.

Hearing the love so many have for spacemacs, I started there first instead.

Quite early on, I ran into problems. Every time I reached out on various forums I was told either: you're doing it wrong, that's a non-issue, RTFM (which isn't helpful when you don't know what you're looking for), or my favorite you have an XY problem (I didn't). So I'd go back to vim and put emacs on the back burner for a while longer, waiting for spacemacs to mature.

After the third attempt at spacemacs, I gave up and started looking for a good emacs tutorial.

Again I ran into some issues, but I found the regular emacs people very welcoming and helpful. Pretty soon I was able to diagnose my own issues, and figure out what settings I needed to change to meet my needs.

In the end, that early advice was true. You need to have some understanding for emacs to help diagnose spacemacs issues.

Will I give spacemacs another shot? Maybe one day, probably around the time the update their main release. It's been what, 2.5 years since they updated the main branch?

Not OP, but I recommend skipping Spacemacs so that people gain experience with configuration and elisp in Emacs.

Having some base level understanding makes understanding other Emacs configurations (like Spacemacs, Doom, Prelude, etc) much easier in my opinion.

I'm of two minds about it. I get the value it provides to people new to Emacs. But once you reach the point in which you'll want to dig in and adapt Emacs to yourself, you'll be facing not just learning elisp and Emacs, but also the complex framework Spacemacs built on top of that.

I've been using Emacs since early 2010s as well, so I'm biased - I had my own convoluted elisp modules before Spacemacs came around :).

Seems like it would make sense to make the file runnable, the "esoteric commands" would work as subcommands / makefile targets of sorts, and the rest of the orgfile would be what they aleady are.

In org-mode there's a concept of `tangle` and you can 'compile' (not sure if thats how org calls it) .org files into a number of individually specified scripts or documents. So you can have your top-level NOTES.org and also your scripts/* entangled.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Extracting-Source-Code.html

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