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Comment by wcaleb | Hacker News Reader

Original author here. Totally agree about version control. When I wrote that post I had not yet learned how to use Git. In a follow-up post I discuss how I now manage all of my notes and citations in plain-text on a Pandoc- and git-powered wiki called Gitit.

http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/plain-text-citations.html

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I appreciate that you mentioned LaTeX and its potential usefulness for these scenarios. You get the ability to version control, without making things especially difficult to translate your text into a more appealing output. Granted, one has to learn typesetting semantics first, but it seems to be a good middle ground.

wcaleb, this is great, thanks for both posts. It's also very inspiring to see your open notebook workflow and experiments.

There's a very timely HN post discussing a vim implementation on top of emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9394144

As much as I like vi's interface, I think emacs implementation is superior, and org-mode invaluable.

Looks great, just watched the video. Have you considered org-mode?

Have looked at, but not really considered. I went down the Vim path pretty early on ...

You can use org-mode with Vim more or less the same as you'd use Markdown if you're planning to compile your doc with Pandoc. You can even use README.org on github in place of README.md, and it will be turned into HTML automagically the same way as Markdown.

Why use org-mode as a format instead of Markdown? Internal cross-references. Org-mode feels just as light weight to me as Markdown for the most part, but it has fewer cases where you can't make things work. Worst case in org-mode, you mix in LaTeX.

org-mode is decent for LaTex markdown substitution. * = Section = SubSection

Etc.

I think I still prefer to just write it in markdown. Word can't come close to the typesetting ability of LaTex.

I tried org-mode for a while, but found it overly complicated. I use Emacs heavily, but developed a couple of Pandoc extensions which give me the org-mode features I need without all of the baggage: http://chriswarbo.net/essays/activecode/index.html

Looks great, thanks a lot for sharing your workflow !

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