angleofrepose

That's fair. Good point. I wish I hadn't notified you so that I could get a content based response from you who seems to have read it. But the fact would still stand, and this isn't great writing by any means. As the other guy said, this isn't the right content for hn, and I see that now. Here I learn my lesson that I can't delete comments on hn.

There are plenty of long hn comments, and they are usually more worthwhile than a two sentence comment. But I see your point and I appreciate you making it.

This would be a fun idea to explore thoroughly in a formal writing rather than a comment on a discussion forum.

Thanks for the tip, it looks like I hit it.

MB has done an amazing job at creating an identity. It seems that some content of his stirs up small controversy on this forum, and while I can't pick apart the minutiae, it's clear on a high level that he has really made a place for himself as a person in the digital world. His work is interesting and beautiful, and is all related in a way that make it clear that he has a theme or drive which he is fulfilling.

From pollen to practical typography to his fonts and back to racket lessons. While I don't know the timeline of publishing, it seems each fit as a part of his path towards a goal, and he did the reader a service by publishing the meta-work. I see his racket lessons and pollen as the side result of goal to write his books, and so then became works themselves.

There are hilarious stories I've heard and read about the way that things used to be "built to last" something a while back about an small Irish village mailman who rode the same bike for decades without ever getting a flat. It was a book I think, can't remember the name though but that image stuck with me. I'm sure that nostalgia and the way stories work have a large part to play in that kind of reminiscents, but there's certainly something to it, and we don't have much of that something these days. I also don't buy much, and I've been rocking my few pair of jeans for years and will for years to come. But my old laptop frame is cracked in many places, my phone screen is cracked for the first time and has been a while now, just waiting for a wayward meeting with water now.

To make it relevant to software, though I admit I haven't read the article, it just seems on topic for the forum and I like the conversations around here. Why are versions, or going out of date, or legacy systems such "a thing"? How did we not realize that the databases airlines used 40 years ago were just going to sit in place until something bad happens, and why is keeping them current or really just lubricated so hard? I have a bike I've been needing to do a little work on lately, just a few things all hitting end of life at around the same time, but it's been treating me well for years, and the fixing up process is simple and obvious. New chain and cassette, replace the cables, replace the break pads and tires. It's clear and obvious how I can take care of my thing, the people at my local bike shop are clear and honest with me and I don't have to take their word for it the first time, I know enough to check and confirm. Those guys are good guys, my bike is a good bike. I'm a good owner (mostly). It's a good happy system.

I don't know my electronic stuff, I don't know my hardware and I don't know my OS and I don't know my software. I can't tell whether the guy at Fry's or Newegg is cheating me or not. I don't really get how displays have so many damn names and resolutions and surfaces. I mean I get it, but what is a "Retina Display" or a "butterfly keyboard". As if I was selling you a "Surefire chain". What the heck is a "surefire"? I want a bike chain. I know my computer very well, I fight it sometimes, and over the years I got to know it better. I really enjoy playing with tiling wms and xmodmap and I think there is a world of opportunity there (mostly because our modern pop culture doesn't care so much about input devices as PC innovators used to). But my phone? Man, I wish. It seems so clear to me that I can do so many magical handy things with my phone. I know the area, I've lived here for years, but it's a bigger city. Can you just get me to the freeway then turn off the nav? Not a chance. Ah I just accidentally swiped that notification or, what's this, my alarm did go off when I wanted but then it decided to stop and just let me know I overslept. Where are these software logic decisions being made? Can I prevent some action? How do I know what non-visual state changed and most importantly why!? Please give me a simple state dashboard, this is how the real world works. I can see why my sink is leaking or my shelf fell over. I can find why my feet are getting wet and the trash smells. Give me digital physics please so that I can see what is happening to me. Where are things logged? I have a GPS, can I use it? Can I have the best contouring route down this mountain? No it's not likely anyone has been here before or done this with a phone in hand, no I don't care the time prediction or reviews, I just want some lines on a map. I just have a quick question about literal figures my software systems have access to and I can see it, but no way for me to use this ui to get it without coding my own thing up.

This is why I enjoy coding, because I can make it do what I want. But also screw that; hours of work for a simple connection between two things that I decided should be connected in an instance of use. I can't do this for everything, I know most things are extensible, but I don't have the energy or interest to figure them all out. I want my whole digital experience to be mine, I'll buy other people's pieces to put in, like I buy furniture for my house. But it's my house, not Google's or my local municipality's. I really enjoy woodwork, I'm not so skilled myself, but my friends are. So I want their stuff, or my simple stuff, or the local farmer's market stuff. I want a simple digital life. I want simple software. If I don't get to see all the latest events or robberies I'm ok with that. I'll find ways to incorporate my neighborhood at my own pace, and with those people directly in mind. I want it designed for me as an individual, not the way something like NextDoor (what's that apps name?) Is designed for what seems to be "The American Neighborhood", that's way too damn broad.

I want my tools to work the way I want them to work.

Well, long uncertain ramble. Thanks for reading, and I'm glad your kid is using your pants, I think that's hilarious and great. I love all my Dad's stuff, or even just stuff I get to use with him. My Grandad also can tell stories for endless hours, and it's become one of my favorite qualities in the friends I have, and one I love to share with the people around me. Cheers.

(I wrote this on mobile, though I'm sure I'll get to cleaning this up in the next couple days, I apologise in advance for autocorrect and punctuation)

Ha, you're probably right. Frustrating, but makes sense. Thanks for taking that on.

Plain text on top of a programmable interface is the way to go. I like this comment from yesterdays 26.2 release [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650131

> It allows us to throw different use-case-optimized GUIs at a sync'ed folder of org-mode files. A clear example are the mobile apps, but there are others.

This is a good point, I agree.

> As for the knowledge base features, however, I'm still far from being able to reproduce the speed and precision of recall that I had on InfoSelect, or even Evernote with a solid tag hierarchy. I also use Dynalist to have an outliner on mobile.

What speed and precision are you missing? It seems that org mode should have the capacity to establish any content connection scheme you could dream up.

> KB situations

What does KB mean?

> I would also love to be able to browse connections in my knowledge base, TheBrain-style, but that will always be clunky to unusable on a pure-text UI.

I don't think this is true. Depending on the kinds of connections you want to browse in your knowledge base there are plenty of ways to transform the ui to show them. That is what I see org mode to be at it's essence, a software tool to allow for transformations of text on screens. I think though, that your point is more about browsing. We should have text-based ui browsers for connections. All a gui like the brain is doing is putting animations and a mouse on top, we can definitely specify things via the keyboard in a number of ways to replace the mouse, and who wants animations to begin with? If the main pull at the end of the day is that GUIs are pretty and text UIs aren't then let me point you here [1].

[1]: https://lepisma.github.io/2017/10/28/ricing-org-mode/index.h...

For sure, I think in the 2008 Google Talk by Carsten Dominik (org mode creator) his host makes a comment from the back of the room that he has a use case(among others) of creating html tables in org mode because its so easy. Org mode has so much functionality hooked in to plaintext structures it is ridiculous. Tab and S-Tab alone do so much work in an org mode workflow, it is things like this that make it hard for for me to understand what good an external parser for org mode would do. Org mode is incredibly feature rich for authoring.

What sense does it make to have org mode outside of emacs? I think the entire power of the system would be that it explicitly lives within emacs. From the repo:

> Org is probably the best and most complete plain text organizational system known to mankind. It has countless applications like authoring, publishing, task and time tracking, journal, blog, agenda, wiki etc...

Yes, absolutely.

> Unfortunately Org was originally developed for Emacs and therefore available only inside Emacs. It is a huge limiting factor for Org's development and popularization. Because of that it is not as popular outside of Emacs community as it should be.

"Unfortunately"? It is a dynamic tool, I don't understand what it would mean for it available outside of emacs except for if that were also a dynamic tool. Are you going to create a standalone dynamic org mode application? It seems better to make a "stripped down" emacs that only has org mode and literate programming features so as to not have as steep a learning curve as the entirety of emacs all at once. What other reason is there for this work except for avoiding the learning curve of emacs? Emacs has got to be one of the most configurable pieces of software outside of Operating Systems(maybe?) in existence.

Org mode is powerful because it is a plaintext system that gives hooks for emacs abilities like transformation (faces, folding, tagging/searching, agenda features) and execution of code with literate programming, and passing values around between code blocks and so on.

Why would this want to live outside of emacs? I do think the recently (and again two years ago) extremely popular post on org mode's markup language absolutely misses this point[1]. This post is also linked to from the repo.

I'd love to learn about what I'm missing here, and would love to get some answers to my questions or responses to my assumptions! I'm very interested in your roadmap and design decisions, I think your external links (except for that article) are fantastic. I will follow the project for sure.

I just think there is some mental disconnect with how org mode is represented and discussed on hn, and those discussions almost all seem to miss the majority of org mode abilities that absolutely depend on living in the style of environment that emacs provides. From reading the top discussions here, one might think org mode is in competition for the same space as markdown while that is not even remotely true [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622019

[2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=org%20mode&sort=byPopularity&p...

PS: I am trying to do a more thorough review of the discussion about org mode on hn, and I will be taking actual notes and comment links down to better explain my ideas here rather that just general takeaways. Thanks for bearing with me, or letting me know if you disagree.

I haven't had the chance to give this a really solid skim or do any background searches for the author or any related work, but given that, what do you like about this? Why do you post it, why do you think it is interesting, or what did you learn from it?

I intend to check it out, do you have any leads for me? Or suggested sections?

Thank you.

Or, better yet, a UI builder accessible through that "advanced features" menu that lets the user decide what is accessible and easy.

> Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did.

This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people to build their experience.

I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or whatever it is.

3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach: https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq

3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim

Any other ideas on what "could be the better tool"? I haven't really used plantuml or one of the couple of others like memraid or flowchart other than playing around with them, but my dream tool in that arena is something that has the same accessibility (`->` and other minimal notation) but to drive more of the note taking process like I have on paper. I think it would be great to be able to right justify or write on both sides of the same line or otherwise position text or wrap it in a box like can be easily done in a tool like OneNote(or my notebook) but driven entirely by the keyboard. If there were something like markdown but for text positioning rather than styling.

It seems to me that a keyboard driven OneNote would be fantastic. I already do a lot of writing in my vim/markdown setup because folding is so useful. I just want more mindmap style control, or the ability to define my own notations. On paper I often comment or converse with ideas on the right third of the page, and I should be able to do that with a `<` denotation just like markdown does blockquote with `>`.

That's a cool idea with gl and gr. I've never used 0 and $ in vim, D or C get me to the end, and I have what is probably an anti-patter in hitting I<esc> or A<esc> to get to beginning or end otherwise. Or its a change inside quotes or parens or db.

One funny anti-pattern I just noticed I have recently is when editing the last line I've written in notes I'll open a new line with O then immediately exit to normal mode, only to have the next thing I do be to hit i for insert.

I guess my long winded point is that it's easy to have anti-patterns sneak up on you and it's nice to see someone else's re-designed keybindings on a modal style interface to spur reflection on our own setups.

Gary Bernhardt has a good take on this in his talk A Whole New World [1]. He introduces an editor which has these layers which can display or hide orthogonal information such as types, a short view or profiling details. That talk, and your comment and my inability to find anything that does this kind of work simply surprises me. Are there no good examples of systems that allow these kind of simple transformations out there? I remember someone pointing me to a clojure editor a while back, maybe? I can't remember.

Seems to me there is a desire for editors that allow a user to transform code, whether it be annotations or raster graphics as Bernhardt puts it. The closest I know of is org mode, and how it works on a plaintext interface but has no qualms about displaying it in wildly different ways than an org file might look opened up in vim, though it still does maintain readablity. I think this is the way to go and I've been playing around with a personal workflow on top of org mode lately. What do you think?

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

Lots of cool stuff around Adam's work, it was really interesting to see what patterns people had for Jupyter notebooks as maybe the most popular literate programming environment (?).

I particularly liked the extension he developed [1] and I think it is a good thematic representation of the work. He's looking at workflows and affordances of the toolset, and so built a piece himself.

(All things arc towards emacs and org mode)

[1]: https://github.com/acrule/janus/blob/master/README.md

Orca is just one piece of the world that this guy has been building at https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#home

He's got a suite of tools: Left, Dotgrid, Ronin, Marabu (text, graphics, super-graphics, audio).

Then a logging/personal wiki setup that I think is fascinating: Nataniev, Horaire, Oscean. Which goes all the way down to his own database formats and time format.

The philosophy and aesthetic of his work is awesome in the completeness of associated art and the connection between the build-up of his own software ecosystem. I've been following xxiivv for a while, and it's always changing and always inspiring. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on his system and would be happy to talk more about it!

For example, Orca, featured here, used to be Pico which was a sort of playground environment like Orca but before it was the audio playground it is now. I'm not sure this is the best commit to pick out, but I just wanted to share how active he is on his software projects, and that environments really are a theme for him.

https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca/tree/8cd3827fb6e01005...

He's built a synthetic human language: Lietal, and his partner has a recipe sharing and cooking exploration site at grimgrains. Which also shares a unique personal aesthetic. They also live on a boat (see Pino).

I am personally most interested in Ronin (under tools). It explains itself as a cross between vim and Photoshop, and though it is in a semi-broken state now, I had a great afternoon hacking on it playing around with pens and magnet mode. I play around a lot with processing and p5, and love to build generative style systems like Casey Reas shows off in his Compendium [1]. I see Ronin as an example next step towards creating an environment in which to mess with these things, rather than my standard of playing around in vim, and running it with each new tweak.

Edit: at a computer now, so links for some of the above:

- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#tools

- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#nataniev

- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#lietal

- https://grimgrains.com/#home

[1]http://reas.com/compendium_text/

[1]https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9h469--G5OwOGVfVmUxZUQ5VzA...

I'm struck by the harshness of this piece. Starting with a jump scare going to suicide and porn. Beautiful graphics and I think the message is brilliant regardless of the fact that it ends as an ad.

Because he's a person. Because she has problems. Because he has a family. Because that's my friend and uncle and neighbor. What on Earth do you mean "why do we have to care about them?" Because they're real.

I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.

Completely agree, but we can also figure out how to make it easier. Take a look at http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html#_improving_o... (this is the section that introduces the flip on vim's command structure, but is otherwise a great article to read top to bottom).

There are a lot of ways vim is right or not right, but this lowers the barrier to entry in a profound way. We can keep advancing like this, and stacking those advancements on each other until vim isn't hard. Maybe? What do you think?

I think one of the big ways vim is hard is what Kakoune attempts to fix - visualizing selection. Adding a "layer" to working in vim, we had `u` and `^r` to figure things out - doing something and knowing we could go back. Now with Kakoune we have movement before action. This adds another way the program can converse with the user.

Disclaimer: I don't use Kakoune, but I dig what it's doing and I want to try it out. I think it is a fantastic critique of vim.