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Comment by jhchabran | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this trend of porting stuff from emacs to vim.

If I clearly understand the point of emacs's org mode, I don't get how it could go along vim considering it's a "powerful text editor" not an IDE. It just don't match the intended worflow (at least mine).

I much prefer how mutt is handling things, just taking care of emails and delegating text editing to vim.

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You don't get this trend? (If there is a trend.)

So let me explain: some people have no interest in using emacs. It is not helpful to make them use emacs. Vim grows plugins for any functionality which a vim user wanted. That functionality is presumably their intended workflow.

There is no domain of forbidden functionality which Vim is simply not allowed to do, that is ridiculous.

Hey, I'm just stating my opinion, not forbidding anything.

I'm not against adding features on vim, I'm suggesting that doing it that way isn't to the vim-ish way. My opinion is that when it comes to vim, unix is the whole IDE, not just vim itself.By no way I mean I hold the truth but it doesn't mean I can't have an opinion and discuss it here !

Having emacs as a dependency for some features is ridiculous.

I'd be interested as to what you think the point of org-mode is. It's principally a free form note taking and outlining mode, not a todo app like you might be imagining.

edit: clarified intent

That's not entirely true. org-mode is quite flexible and serves as a lot of things, and one of them is in fact as a TODO list [1]. This becomes particularly true when you use the TODO extensions.

I am constantly surprised at the capabilities of org-mode. Some sociologists that I'm aware of actually generate their LaTeX publications through org-mode [2].

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/TODO-Items.html

[2] http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf (generated through org-mode, source: https://github.com/kjhealy/workflow-paper)

I should clarify... Yes org-mode has todo features, including calendering, scheduling, etc, but listen some of the talks Carsten Dominik gives where he explains his rational: http://orgmode.org/talks.html It's core is as an flexible note-taking app with all those features as extensions to the core, just like the document links, and timestamp features.

In theory, org todos are born as notes which you later realize are actually todo items. Taken in this light, it makes sense as a text editor extension rather than an app in its own right.

I've just launched it a few times in my emacs days, it seemed pretty powerful as the documentation suggest : http://orgmode.org/guide/index.html . I may be getting something wrong, but it do not look like just "edit todo.txt + cosmetics" to me.

For example, if I understand correctly C-c a a (http://orgmode.org/guide/Weekly_002fdaily-agenda.html#Weekly...) compiles an agenda. I'd rather have a small program to do that and launch vim on each todo like mutt for writing emails than having it bundled in my editor.

Edit If I were using emacs daily, I'd gladly use org-mode :)

Eh? I have been using org-mode for years for calendaring, smart todo-lists and what not -- with all the things like deadlines, schedules, repeated items, tags, priorities etc. etc.

I use org-mode as a Getting Things Done utility + a replacement for Evernote. (Synced up via Dropbox, it works swimmingly well!)

I agree. When I need to edit text in an app, I'd much rather use the editor of my choice. For example, the mysql client will launch $EDITOR when you type \e at the prompt.

That's one of my favorite features of Pentadactyl: letting you edit the content of textboxes from any webpage in your editor of choice (I use GVIm) by simply pressing CTRL+I.

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