Ask HN: Org-mode, Emacs, and non-Emacs editors | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Org-mode, Emacs, and non-Emacs editors

4 pointsMollyRealized3 comments

I've heard so much over the years about org-mode and how it is an absolute lifesaver, it is the god of organization for one's brain. (That isn't meant mockingly, but I'm trying to convey how much it has been built up.)

Unfortunately, even when I was on Linux, I went for nano or pico, and on other systems I've been a BBEdit or Notepad++ user.

For someone who never learnt the keystrokes necessary for emacs, and so never really experienced org-mode, can someone explain why org-mode is so lauded, and what it does that is so unique when compared to other organizers, to-do lists, etc.?

Is there any way to achieve that effect outside of emacs?

Thank you. Please note: this is meant sincerely and is simply a plea for insight and/or to look at the product from the view of someone who uses it and understands it. I'm basically looking for that insight of the knowledgable, wanting to know, I suppose, what I'm missing out on ...

Org mode as it's core is basically an outliner, a tree in terms of data structure. And comes with tools to manipulate and navigate that tree. As all documents are trees, that makes it quite good with notes.

But it add a few stuff to those trees like marking them as tasks, assigning tags and properties to them. And that makes it nice for time tracking, tasks management, and project management. And because it's all trees, constructing a database out of it to build an agenda is easy and obvious. It's called agenda, but it can show both a time-based view and a tag( and property?)-based view. But no one says that it needs to be tasks (I track book releases with org).

And I've said that documents are tree, it turns out that org-mode has features to export your org tree to lot of documents format (latex, html, markdown,...), and it has markup that translate nicely to those. Another thing it haves is document level properties in addition to node properties, which lets you customize a lot of these features.

And it has code blocks (there are other blocks too eg. for quotations) and have a nice integration to both highlight and runs the snippet in it. And because the document is linear, you can choose to export all the codes to specific files (configurable at block level) and it will do so . That's very nice when you want both documents and code side by side (aka literate programming).

The other nice thing is the table markup. It can do some computation, but the nice thing is that you can do operations it without aligning everything over and over as it automatically does.

What makes org really useful is not org itself, but Emacs. Org leverages a lot of Emacs features and you'd probably have to replicate them in other ecosystems. And it's not one way, you can easily tie org-mode to other packages and make something that truly useful to you.

Thank you. This gives me a really strong understanding/insight into why it's appreciated. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain/write that out.

Grep and nano do 90% of what org-mode does without the albatross of emacs. Source: I am an emacs core developer.

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