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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

> the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices.

Isn't it incredible that we've lost the ability, as a culture, to be on top of things without our pocket supercomputers?

I don't need org mode on my phone. I dont need it on every device I own. I use org mode on my PC, and if I need any form of portability I can jot stuff down on a little piece of paper.

Also, it's just text. We have countless services that can synchronize plain text files. Stop being whiney and pick one.

> And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book

Stop being so snotty.

> and start presenting something they made in emacs…

Yeah, I love an editor talk actually. Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

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I’d never heard it put that way, that presenting in an editor is a strong no-bullshit signal, but how true is this!

I had a professor who would teach from Emacs. She would store each section of the lecture in a register and paste as she went. (Watching her cursor flit around the buffer was actually strong encouragement for me to learn Emacs; it was nice to see how deftly it could be done without interrupting the flow of the lecture.)

She had slides too, but obviously being in Emacs for these portions allowed interactive displays of code execution.

> Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

I think there are two kinds of bullshit relevant to meetings. One is spin or dishonesty, and the other is wasting people's time. Presenting with an editor can mean that what's about to be presented is honest and straight-forward, being grounded in the actual matter being discussed. Or it can mean that an engineer did zero prep for the meeting.

Here is Rich Hickey doing a conference talk in orgmode ;) https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376

> I don't need org mode on my phone. ... little piece of paper.

And then type that back on a computer? No, thanks, no desktop-oriented note format is ever worth going back that deep into the caves

Do you really have that long of notes that summarizing your handwritten note into a couple sentences max, and serializing it into org-mode is such a travesty?

It really seems like people hate org-mode just to hate it, because they've heard so much praise that there needs to be some sort of counter-culture. Even if it doesn't actually make sense.

People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

They are noting a serious gap in its capabilities. I say this as a long-term org user, too -- I've tried to mobile tools, and they don't work for me.

Org is great if you live in emacs and have no need or desire to access that corpus of data when you're not sitting at a computer. But in 2023, that's a pretty serious drawback, and pretending it isn't is a weird look.

> People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

Org-mode files are text files. Anything that can sync text files will happily sync them. Anything that can edit text files can happily edit them. Sure, emacs is the best way to work with org files, but nothing is stopping you from syncing it with whatever you want (I use Nextcloud) and editing it with whatever you want.

I feel like this is such a key feature of org mode that people are missing. It isn't magic. It's just text, with a buttload of convenience functions that happen to be written in elisp.

...and to which you have no access in a non-emacs environment, which is why "it's text! just sync and open in whatever!" isn't a good mobile answer.

The inability to fold headings alone is a dealkiller, and enough reason to look for something else. Which is why Obsidian is so interesting to a lot of folks who use orgmode but are not attached to emacs at a religious level.

Yeah, I suppose if someone really needs that capability, then Org (at least currently) isn't the markup for them.

I mostly referring to the "why do people keep bringing it up - it's such a joke" aspect. Well, it's obviously because lots of people find it awesome and more than adequate.

I don't have long notes precisely because I haven't ignored progress and try to use a pocket computer. Also, what's your theory of communication that explains why people casually dismiss serious flaws and switch the discussion to people and culture?

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