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Comment by cannam | Hacker News Reader

Very impressed by the proportion of people who primarily use daemon/emacsclient. (I don't, but I always sort of think I should)

Surprised, and if I'm honest a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings.

Absolutely amazed that so many people report using org-mode daily. Either the whole survey is primarily a survey of org-mode users, rather than Emacs users in general, perhaps because of the HN posting (I get the impression HN loves org-mode) - or nobody else uses Emacs.

Even more amazed about the questions on "completion frameworks" and packages for error checking (what?) in both of which the winning answer is something I've never heard of. I shall have to see what they're all about.

Finally - oh blimey, everyone reads /r/emacs. Perhaps that explains it all.

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I'm inferring that you, like me, are a longtime emacs user with some inertia.

I used to not use daemon/emacsclient until it got annoying to have multiple emacs windows popping up, then I switched. Nothing to be impressed about it; even lazy ones like me eventually get there.

I'm also surprised about the vi keybindings, but not at all distressed. If there are a lot of people out there who are accustomed to vi keybindings but found reasons to want to use emacs, that's a good thing.

I don't use org-mode daily, but I do edit my todo list daily. If it ever gets deeply nested I'll switch it over to org mode. And I suspect that's what all the people using org-mode daily are doing -- todo/idea lists.

I should start reading /r/emacs every few years to catch up on new things.

I've used Emacs for over 20 years and I have been meaning to switch to vi keybindings for a while (but haven't yet :). I just find myself executing long commands with only 4 of my fingers engaged, because one of them is holding a modifier key, and it's somewhat uncomfortable. Not injury-causing uncomfortable, but enough to make me think "hey, I think the other team got this right." I would not mind switching between command and insert modes; I can keep the state in my head instead of in my finger.

The barrier to switching, for me, is that the vi-like modes are set up by default to have vi-like keybindings, and I just don't care to go in and change them all to Emacs-alike keys, and I worry how flexible other software with "vi mode" will be about that. I am past the point where I'm going to use hjkl to move the cursor around, I use npfb. I can easily change the details in Emacs/Viper, but then how am I going to use anything else, like the shell? That is my main worry.

It sounds like you would like god-mode: https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

I'm a light weight emacs user (mostly for org mode). I'm forever grateful to the dev I worked with who introduced and encouraged me to learn the vi bindings.

I'm probably missing something in your message, but there is support in the shell for vi bindings (https://opensource.com/article/17/3/fun-vi-mode-your-shell)

Exactly - with inertia, or maybe oblivious. I think it's just a little discombobulating to read about a program I spend so much time using myself being used in ways quite far away from what I know about.

That's a good thing I'm sure; it makes sense that a super-configurable extensible application should be super-configured and extended. But it's a little odd to imagine, perhaps, saying "oh this is Emacs? great" and then finding that you don't actually know how to work it.

I started using daemon/emacsclient several years ago and never looked back. Especially since I use named servers per project or language or whatever. Like, I have an erc emacs daemon that just handles IRC stuffs. I have one for (this month) aoc (Advent of Code). I have a ledger one for tracking my money. And then one for any other active projects. And if I want to kill the displayed instances (say I'm done with project X for this week), I can without "losing my place", all the buffers stay open (which is fine for the way I interact with files, just make sure to save).

I made a couple shell functions/aliases to help me out. emacsd $servername and e for emacsclient -t. So spinning them up is trivial, and accessing them is just e -s $servername. With no name, it's just the default instance (used for random editing that's not part of a project or something I care to keep cleanly separated).

For years I specifically used a separate emacs daemon for ERC because I don't really know how to perfectly cleanly update a given package in a running emacs in-place, and I wanted to keep my IRC uptime (and I'm not using a bouncer for some reason). So I would just leave ERC running in a daemon for the machine's entire uptime without ever updating any of its packages.

This is giving me nostalgia for when I used to use bitlbee + libpurple and have all my chat+irc in a single client (ERC). Good times.

> a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings

Why would other people's preferences distress you?

Org is quite unique. I use it daily, and I would feel a bit less anxious if the language was standardized as this would facilitate alternative implementations outside Emacs. Right now, the implementation is the standard and that is a bit messy.

I don't know about any other language that combines a plain text outliner, keywords, tags, timestamps, hyperlinks and tables. These are exceptionally good primitives to implement a myriad of workflows. And I've left out some incredible features I do not use, like literate programming.

Applications like Things or OmniFocus are nice, but they can't adapt to alternative workflows. OmniOutliner was pretty great, though, and motivated some Org features during the GTD craze of late 2000s.

I think what makes Org special—just like Emacs—is that it's a small system that can grow. You can customize it however you like, and it's easy to add functionality on top of (or into) the core system. In practice, would standardization hinder this property? It seems like the cost of evolving org-mode would become much higher if there were a formal standard and a number of actively used implementations—we'd have to worry about backwards compatibility, inconsistencies between systems... etc.

As it happens, I absolutely would love better support for org-mode workflows in other systems, especially on mobile. (I use Orgzly on Android which is fine but also limited and inflexible.) I could also see a native org-mode implementation making core operations much faster, although the EmacsGCC work is making a real improvement on that front already.

But I worry that supporting that would sacrifice the very properties that let org-mode evolve into what it is and to continue evolving even now.

I was one of the ones that reported using org-mode daily. I had to think a bit about that at first. I don't use it any hard core fashion as an organizer or for task management or anything. But it has supplanted Markdown and RST as my go-to for lightweight markup. Whenever I would have previously started a .txt, .rst, or .md buffer to jot some quick notes down, I now find myself creating a new .org buffer instead. So on reflection I would have to say that I use it nearly daily, even if in a basic and ad-hoc way.

Using Emacs and using org-mode daily is like using an IDE and using code navigation daily, or like using Gimp or Photoshop and using quick mask mode daily, or using MS Word and using the style system daily, etc.

It's one of the best parts, it's built-in, using it is one of the reasons you chose that software at all.

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