Temporary .spacemacs Configuration File For Mac

I've switched to Emacs after 14 years of Vim (with the required evangelism^^). Initially it was because of Clojure, but then I tried org-mode. Now my GTD Setup (formerly Things.app), Notes for everything (formerly Evernote), Time Tracking (formerly Minco), Pomodoro Technique as well as writing slide decks (I'm a part time lecturer, so I do that a lot) are all within org-mode. And not, because it's hipster, but because it's just so much better - plus it's completely platform agnostic and future proof, because it's just text. Cannot recommend it more. I started using simple outlines for meeting minutes and quickly realised that it will be easy and more efficient to migrate the aforementioned workflows into org-mode, too. A last one: Finally I can properly link between Mails, todos and notes (using mu4e for mails).

That was never completely working on OS X with Evernote, Mail.app and Things and is just so important! I'm relieved to see that it's not just me.

With all the recent praise spacemacs has been getting, I felt like maybe I was taking crazy-pills or something. It's a very aesthetically pleasing setup, and a fine editor on its own, I'm sure, but it feels a little disingenuous to me the way they aggressively market to Vim users. Like you, I've been using Vim for around 10 years, so any departure in behavior has the potential to seriously cramp my workflow. (One of the big lures of spacemacs and/or evil-mode for me is that I've always been envious of Emacs Lisp. I see things like GNUS and org-mode and SLIME.

Then I see Vimscript, and I hang my head in shame.). I started using spacemacs (without evil) a few months ago and before that I was using a customized emacs. Spacemacs improves the user experience with their package management approach (it kicks much ass). Not only that but the c-c-mode is almost as good as what I had configured and it took 5 minutes to configure instead many days.

The version of which-key, magit and org-mode provided by spacemacs is better than what I used to have and greatly improved my emacs experience. I can't recommend it enough.

My spacemacs file on github for anymone who is interested. Any vim user, try this: 1. Brew install emacs, apt-get install emacs, or pkg add emacs 2. Vim /.emacs 3. Paste the following, verbatim. Don't bother reading it: (require 'package);; You might already have this line (add-to-list 'package-archives '('melpa'.

These are called 'M-x' in emacs parlance. And if you use the GUI version of emacs, you can use alt-x instead of pressing escape then x. It's much easier, but doesn't seem to work in the terminal. That works in all my terminals — I suspect something's awry with your settings. One issue is that if you use gnome-terminal under Ubuntu, I think by default it steals alt for its own menus. There's a setting to disable that, and I always selected it when I used gnome-terminal, because who uses GUI menus with a terminal? Nowadays I just use st.

Another tip is to set your caps lock key to control. This is one of those 'how did I ever live without this?' Things (I actually buy keyboards where the control key is physically where caps lock is on most; it's that vital). And if you write any Lisp or code, you might like to swap parentheses & square brackets.

For me, at least, it's another one of those 'how did I ever live without this?' I type parens all the time, and now I don't have to hit shift. It's wonderful.

It could also be if he's on a Mac, you have to go to Terminal - Preferences - select your current profile - Keyboard - check 'Use option as meta key' I found that out because I was trying to start using org mode but I'm new to emacs. That was one of many issues I ran into trying to get it to work.

(First was that the emacs that comes with OS X is ancient and doesn't have org-mode, so I had to use brew to get a good version). Next is none of the tutorials actually match the shortcuts that org-mode actually uses on my system. Another tip is to set your caps lock key to control.

This is one of those 'how did I ever live without this?' Things (I actually buy keyboards where the control key is physically where caps lock is on most; it's that vital). I recently switched from Vim (still using it through plugins in some IDEs) and decided to not start with Evil mode but give Emacs keybindings a proper go. Switching the capslock key to CTRL has been crucial. This switch is a built in feature in OS X and Gnome. Downloaded a third party app in windows for my corporate pc.

For this remapping and a few others I'm using Karabiner for OSX. I remap elisp commands in emacs all the time, but I don't know how to remap the keybinding for the single SHIFT to parens. The answer might be here: Karabiner is pretty good though, and you can select certain keybindings to only work in emacs. I've also remapped CONTROL to CAPS LOCK, a more common re-binding to save one's left-hand from endless torture and mutilation!

Karabiner On GitHub It's also pretty simple to extend Karabiner with XML scripts. It looks like your URL 404's though. All of it is pretty interesting, but it's sort of unreasonable to say 'Here, read this tome.' You can skip to the Wyvern section for the important bit.

Gamedevs will be particularly interested, because the question of 'How do I enable people to write games in the most flexible way?' Is one of the great unsolved problems in gamedev.

There's just no good way to do it. Every engine has tradeoffs, but circa 2016 these tradeoffs are anachronistic. A modern engine should be written mostly in the scripting language that it provides. Most of the codebase that would otherwise be C code should be script.

This can be done with almost no performance penalty. So the only question left, once you decide to really do this, is how do you design it? I think Emacs' design is the answer. Almost all of the core ideas can be incorporated into a modern game engine, provided that it's built from scratch.

Few people have the skills or the inclination to pull this off, which is why it hasn't happened yet. But I suspect anyone who does this will end up with thousands of users who love making things in it.

As with Emacs. I think that emacs's core idea is a small core (pun intended) of functionality written in a high-speed language (C in emacs's case), entirely orchestrated and glued together in a high-productivity dynamic language (elisp). Emacs really isn't a scriptable editor: it's an editor written in a 'scripting' language atop a relatively small set of primitives which happen to be useful for editing. But it's also an email client written in that same language, and a version-control interface, and a web browser, and a news client, and a Tetris game, and. I think I have what you're looking for.:) With this, you can capture HTML content directly into Org, converted into Org syntax with Pandoc. For example, to capture your comment into Org, I just highlight it in Pentadactyl (Firefox), press 'cc', and Emacs pops up a capture buffer with your comment inserted into the capture template. Or if I press 'ch', it passes it through Pandoc, converting HTML lists, tables, headings, code blocks, etc.

Into their Org counterparts. I also just added support for python-readability, so if I press 'cr', the URL of the page is sent to python-readability, which gets the article content (just like the good ol' Readability bookmarklet), then passes it through Pandoc, and then places it into the capture template. Speaking as a Workflowy user to your concerns, it's the best of all worlds for me: - nightly export to dropbox as plaintext and a backup as a type of json format with more metadata. If Workflowy goes away tomorrow, I have everything and can continue in an editor if I like.

But until then, I use the pretty web interface. multiple device support. I am not going to mess with ssh on my mobile devices. I use Workflowy for everything from extended note-taking and long-form writing to quick pre-set searches on the go for reference; and that's on all my various interfaces (and sometimes other peoples too). Workflowy is easy enough for laypersons to view and/or collaborate in seconds.

No setup necessary on their end. I am a happy paying customer of theirs. This is a very good question! When you come up with a great answer, shoot me a mail!

I actually moved everything that is important for the very long time by hand and started creating everything that's new in org-mode. So, yeah, there's still thousands of notes in Evernote and sometime I get back to them, but those times will become fewer and fewer in time. I'd pay for a tool that converts the EN XML to a proper org-mode file. Even better if I could do that on a regular basis, because EN still rocks most for capturing paper into an OCR'ed PDF. Is it worth the hassle and uncertainty? I guess that depends on what you store in the files, my UTF-8 encoded text files read by org-mode, is easily readable and information can be extracted without (almost) any effort.

Since I store my diary, ideas, manuscripts, cv's, contacts, meeting notes and a myriad of other things, I cant simply trust anything else with the data. I've seen many cases with distraught persons realizing all their treasured data is locked into a obsolete format on a obsolete machine that just crashed. Most comments here seem to focus on the notes and GTD side of org-mode. For me, org-mode is my go to markup language. So much so that I now find writing in Markdown to be almost painful. A few of my favourite features are: - Tables are amazingly easy in org-mode, with spreadsheet features thrown in as well.

Code snippets can be written in their own major mode, giving me syntax highlighting, auto completion and the ability to run the code and embed the output into the markup. Local links autocomplete, so I don't worry about breaking them with typos.

I can export to HTML, Markdown, ODF or PDF. GitHub supports org-mode Readmes. I recently had a paper published written in org mode and I have another in review. I don't plan to write straight LaTeX again. For me, babel is the killer feature. I can write code snippets in the buffer, highlighted and indented according to the corresponding emacs mode, with paredit for lisp, and beautifully exported via pygments. A single key combo lets me evaluate my code in persistent repls associated with my buffer, and I can choose what combo of code/result I want to export.

I had some of my snippets generate raw LaTeX that I could include in the document. Org links make section references trivial, and I have it hooked up to ebib so my citations are pure org. In the emacs buffer, clicking a citation link takes me straight to the bibtex entry.

I don't much use the organiser, but I do use org heavily for writing cross referenced notes about other people's code. When I can, I write everything in Org-Mode: - Code / Project Documentation: Written in Org-Mode, then exported as PDF via Latex - Blog: My complete blog is written in Org-Mode 1 (Source: 2). Via Source-Blocks, I can write Code-Examples directly in the document, execute them there, and make sure they work correctly and / or embed the results. I can even write multiple code blocks and then reference them within each other. This makes it easy to explain a subject by continuously revealing more snippets from a larger code example - Link Lists: I'm storing links to books, articles, papers, in Org-Mode where I can add quotes, tags, or relevant thoughts in a structured way. I actually, currently, use Org-Mode much more for writing than for organising / tasks / todos. OrgMode is one of the killer features of Emacs and the among my top greatest finds in the world of softwares.

Don't use an Orgmode copycat on another platform. Go straight for OrgMode on Emacs. If you are a Vim user, EVIL mode has the best Vim keybindings I have ever used. You don't have to leave your other dev environments for Emacs. Use Emacs only for OrgMode if you like.

My only issue with OrgMode is that it's a bit of a rabbit hole. Sometimes I clean slate my system to get rid of built up complexities, cruft, debt and other messes and I get stuck when I look at OrgMode. It's a full on project to get it to where I feel I want it to be and there is always something I an improve or change. It's never ending. Sometimes I just want something quick which handles just text and has lots of features for doing different things with that text. In this case, I reach for Acsciidoctor. Yes, I know that OrgMode could be the same, but I need the constraints to keep me from tinkering.

I switched from vim to emacs a week or so ago and with evil-mode I hardly even notice. It's actually really good, pretty much a full implementation of vim inside emacs—not like other editor's vim emulation which is usually just hjkl and a few motions ( coughbrackets,atom,vs code cough).

The main reason I switched was to check out org-mode (I didn't even plan to fully switch for a while), and it's that good. Org-mode is the killer app for emacs. Gdb-mode is really good too actually, as is eshell. For web development maybe emacs isn't any better, but for C it's really really nice. I learned VI before Emacs, and by the time I heard about Org Mode, I had developed a way of using Vim similarly; in a nutshell, I write in a clang file (usually named control.c), and (mis)use syntax highlighting on things like switch statement, comments, TODOs and code folding to add structure (screenshot: ).

I did most of my coding in C in college, got into the habit of writing pseudocode into editors, and ended up with this practice. For the Org Mode aficionados: I feel that this 'thing' meets my needs for the most part.

I can create task items, comment them out when I'm done, add notes and TODOs, and fold everything so I can focus on the task I'm working on. What feature do you think I'll benefit the most from, if I decide to switch to Org Mode? This is a rather neat hack, kudos! You've got the syntax highlighting and collapsing which are two important features for such a system. Org-mode is a little more, though.

Say, you have lots of todos with schedules and deadlines, how do you find them? Certainly you could write a regexp and put it in a separate buffer. Or use the org-mode Agenda.

Say, you want to share and export your file, because it's a meeting minute document. Sure, you could write your own parser, convert the thing to markdown and use pandoc. Or use org-mode Export to everything (HTML, PDF, Slides.).

Say, you want to track time on your tasks, because it's client work. Sure, you could write a VIM plugin, but then you realize that VIM and async jobs are hard (yeah, Neovim is coming.). Or use org-mode clocks and reports. Or something else completely - like I mentioned I really do enjoy your hack! However, when re-implementing a tool - I'd first figure out why I need a different tool before I spent working on a new one.

And believe me, I tried to do what you do in VIM(; Ah, and don't be afraid of Emacs - there is a mode called 'evil-mode' that is just the perfect VIM emulation. I'm using it daily. Therefore switching is a matter of minutes. Except if you have lots of handcrafted VIM plugins to port, that is^^.

That's a very neat hack you have there, I'd never thought of that. However, this question: What feature do you think I'll benefit the most from, if I decide to switch to Org Mode? To me, that's like asking, 'What feature do you think I'll benefit the most from if I decide to switch from paper to a computer?' What you have there is syntax highlighting and folding, which is a big improvement over simple text editing. But Org is a system for capturing, manipulating, and exporting structured data that happens to be stored in plain-text.

It's also a tool for literate programming, literate devops, and reproducible research. It's also a tool for writing documents, books, blogs, etc. It's also a PIM/organizer, time-tracker, habit-tracker.

The list goes on and on. Org is basically whatever you want or need it to be. You get out of it what you put into it, and it's with you for the long haul, always becoming more powerful and adaptable. The community is also very friendly. Just check out the mailing list if you need any help. Organizing one's work is a bit different for each person, and since you have done a lot of work in C, certainly vi and clang files are more your /modus operandi/. However for those of us with LISP backgrounds, Emacs is definitely more suitable.

What you gain with org-mode is quite a bit: Org-bable which allows you to write outlines with blocks of text that can call external scripts. This is a bit like a Mathematica workbook, with text notes and evaluations, but you can call to Python, Ruby, or whatever language you want. You can export an.org file into many different formats. LaTeX, HTML and OpenOffice format are what I use most often. Note that you can modify the template to export to any custom format you want.

What is very useful are the Beamer templates, where you can turn an.org document into a slideshow very easily. This is a killer feature for anyone who has to lecture often and needs a quick way to get his notes on some slides that look quite professional. Org-mode also has an agenda, calendar and even contacts if you want to store them there. You can provide links in your agenda to a specific part of your file, so you can click on the TODO link and go immediately to what needs to be done. This is extremely valuable for a large project and saves a lot of time. There is also org-capture for those moments when you are fixing one file and you need to remind yourself to refactor a function in another file.

This helps avoid many bugs especially in a large project where the function definition can be somewhere else. You can also capture any sort of text. When looking up documentation I often capture the web page and put it in a NOTES.org file in a project, especially when it is something obscure that I don't use that often. These notes can also have links/todos, etc. Making it very practical. Also since I do email in Emacs mu4e, I can simply make a TODO from an email with org-capture, and it goes into the agenda. In the agenda I have a link to the original email and to any other file or notes that I add to this task.

This is very handy with bug-reports and things of this sort. Also, I can search my agenda files to see if anything like this has happened before, etc. It really helps to be able to do this without having to be online like with many bug-tracking software - which is very helpful when on a commute in the train. These are just a few things that you would gain with org-mode, but really there is no end to the customization you can do.

It is all written in plain-text and controlled with elisp. I like the fact that with this one tool Emacs I can do so many things, so it is worth the time to know the tool well. It also can expand to do whatever task I need to do. The plain-text format makes it possible to even employ outside tools, such as sed and awk, if I am not inspired in elisp at the moment. To do all the things that I do in Emacs would require learning several different tools each with their own document format and key-bindings and wouldn't even necessarily be adaptable to the task at hand.

On the other hand, you do have the obligatory xkcd. Looks interesting, but Java is a turn-off for me. Even more of a turn-off for me is storing data in Postgres.

Postgres is great, but one of the primary benefits of Org is that it stores data in plain-text. I can get data out of my Org files on any platform with any program that can view text files. To get data out of a Postgres file.is orders of magnitude more complicated. But it looks interesting. I'd recommend putting up some screenshots, because the front page of your site is a list of links without much actual information.:).

My system for remote editing: System A: get a notebook. Write down what you want to capture when you are away from your comp. When you sit down, check your notebook. System B: Run your org mode on a linode. Download Connectbot (SSH client) for your phone. You can now connect to your Org wherever you have cell service and work from one always-running emacs instance with emacs -daemon and emacsclient -c.

I bought a personal blackberry (yes, I know) solely for the physical keyboard which makes throwing out a CTRL or META keypress much easier. Disclaimer: mediocre developer here I have recently switched to emacs from TextMate. I have not been using TextMate to its full potential as I simply did not have the need to do so. It worked great out of the box.

Then I realized that I needed to do much more than just use a text editor and have been glueing a lots of other utilities together. Then I doscovered emacs.

A behemoth godknows how old. And decided to learn it. The learning experience is really steep but I think it's worth it. EMACS survived the test of the time along with VI(m). But sometimes I just feel it's too much and the great extensibility comes at price. I am looking forward to Atom but the performance is not that great compared to EMACS.

You didn't reply under my thread, but I'm glad I saw your post anyway. What I meant is this: I do have a paperless workflow and used to have thousands of Evernote notes with meeting minutes, scans of paper, etc. Whilst this is working pretty well for now on the Desktop and Mobile, there will be a time in 10-40 years when I need to go back to some of those documents.

And whilst I wish Evernote all the best of luck, chances are good that they won't be around or worse. Whilst you are correct in 'as long as binary is documented' it's platform agnostic, you are also completely wrong.

Have you tried to read some documents from just 15 years ago recently? Apart from reading from floppy disks, it's just hard. The internal semantics of org-mode are important to me now, when I do my actual project. In the far future, the only thing that is important is that I can full-text search and find my old legal documents. That's just a billion times more easy and realistic with a flat text file than with a hypothetical well-documented binary format. It's always good to see Org mode flagged up (though it gets a surprising amount of love on HN). I use Org more or less constantly, and I'll take this opportunity to note an Org-related observation that I've been mulling over for a bit.

It's apropos of nothing, but then so was this submission:) The observation has to do with how new Org users get to know the system. The whole thing can seem pretty daunting, especially when you look at some of the examples of TODO setups in the wild. Pretty crazy. My nutshell advice for new users is: in the beginning, you should emphasize learning to use Org's tools effectively, rather than spending time organizing your Org files structurally. The initial impulse is: I'm going to make this file look just like my brain (or my project).

Instead, learn to use the agenda commands, so that you can make the Agenda look like your project, not the file. A couple of reasons for this: If you start out trying to make structure (and I'm also talking about very complicated TODO keyword flowcharts), you're going to get it wrong, and it's going to be a pain in the butt to fix. Learning Agenda commands, on the other hand, will always provide you with more flexibility, not less. It will give you the power to handle new situations easily, and to narrow your focus with ease.

(Actually the same principle applies to Emacs usage in general.) For instance: I do a fair amount of event and conference management, little four/five day things. In the beginning, I started by making Org files where each day was a heading, and then the various events lived under the various headings. This meant that, if events got changed around, I had to go to the file and refile, which isn't terrible, but is a pain. Instead, I now have no day-based headings at all, just a pile of potential events with timestamps. The Agenda organizes things into days for me. If I need to reschedule something, the Agenda provides more than ample commands for shifting dates by hour/day, or simply entering a new date altogether. Dump everything in one file, all top-level todos.

Use the built-in TODO keywords. Learn to make timestamps, and schedule/deadline cookies. After you're good at that, maybe consider using tags (but maybe don't). Spend the rest of your time learning how the Agenda commands work.

Stay in the Agenda, and if you must look at a file, do it with on the headline (followed by 'o' when you're done), or, if you must,. Resist the temptation to futz with your files at all, until some real need begins to emerge from daily usage.

If you hold out until the annoyance is killing you, it should be very clear what needs to change, and how, and you're unlikely to do something that you'll regret later. (I should note that I use Org for two general types of work: one is document authoring, the other is todo/agenda management. The above basically only applies to the latter.) Learn to impose dynamic, temporary structure on your agenda, rather than imposing static, one-time structure on your files. Here endeth the (unasked-for) lesson.:).

Stay in the Agenda, and if you must look at a file, do it with on the headline (followed by 'o' when you're done) I've been using Org for several years, but I never knew about the SPC/o combination in the Agenda (I recently discovered TAB). Thanks for sharing that! Another great agenda feature is bulk editing. Mark entries with `m`, and then use `B` to act on them. Bulk refiling is really handy! Scatter is a neat feature too. Also, I've come to really like indirect buffers (`org-tree-to-indirect-buffer`).

You might also find this useful: (defun ap/org-agenda-goto-heading-in-indirect-buffer (&optional switch-to) 'Go to the current agenda headline in an indirect buffer. If SWITCH-TO is non-nil, close the org-agenda window.' (interactive) (if switch-to (org-agenda-switch-to) (org-agenda-goto)) (org-tree-to-indirect-buffer);; Put the non-indirect buffer at the bottom of the prev-buffers;; list so it won't be selected when the indirect buffer is killed (set-window-prev-buffers nil (append (cdr (window-prev-buffers)) (car (window-prev-buffers))))) (defun ap/org-agenda-switch-to-heading-in-indirect-buffer (interactive) (ap/org-agenda-goto-heading-in-indirect-buffer t)). No, just write your document:) Seriously, that's the side of things where Org is meant to get out of your way, not provide you with a bunch of flashy tools. Learning to create and manipulate headings (move up, move down, indent, outdent) should take you all of fifteen minutes. Add plain lists, if you like, and footnotes.

That's about it. Where things do get complicated is when you start exporting documents, and realize it would look a bit better if this bit were just a bit different, and then. But all that stuff, while fiddly, is pretty straightforward, it doesn't have the emergent complexity of agenda handling.

I switched from using org-mode a long time ago and now I strictly use markdown. I find doing simple things like including links, referencing images, and code blocks are so much easier in markdown and I never have to look up how to do something if I stop using it for a while MARKDOWN: ```python #code ``` Google(!Image ALT text(path/to/image.png 'Title Text') ORG-MODE: #+BEGINSRC python #code #+ENDSRC #+CAPTION: Image caption path/to/image.png.

I think there are a couple of key things that people need to grasp with Org mode. First is the way it cycles visibility. You go from closed, to semi-open, to completely open, back to closed again. You can't go backwards. I know this frustrated me for a long time before I got used to it.

The next biggest frustration is the way it folds empty lines. If you have a paragraph followed by an empty line, when you fold the paragraph, the trailing empty line will get folded as well. This makes it practically impossible to have empty spaces in your outline. Trying to make it work will result in madness for your average user. Just relenting on those 2 issues and allowing org mode it's own way will go a long way to making it easier to use, I've found. The main benefit I've found for using org mode is being able to write up TODO lists and then easily move everything around by folding it and cutting and pasting.

Also being able to change the organization by easily changing the hierarchy is amazing. I know of no other application that allows so much ease of change. After that, the spreadsheet capabilities are really quite interesting. I've actually implemented full on XP-style planning lists with automatic velocity calculation in org mode - complete with automatically generated burn down charts. Of course, other people use org mode for completely other uses. This is just what I end up using it for. I too found the behavior of visibility cycling via to be a little annoying.

What frustrated me was that pressing a third time throws a tonne of text (assuming you have a reasonable amount of text) at the buffer. Recently I started using some other visibility commands like show-children (C-c ) and show-branches (C-c C-k).

For example, I use org-capture+datetree when taking notes and can have months worth of information in an org buffer. I like to use '2 C-c ' when situated on a month headline to show me all of the top level headings for each day in that month. It gives me a nice overview of what I have been doing for the month. With regard to your second issue, you can control this behavior with the org-cycle-separator-lines variable. By default, leaving two blank lines will make org leave a space in your outline when folding. I am an emacs user, but my initial foray into org mode wasn't particularly successful. I was much happier in OneNote.

Now that I work mostly in an OSX environment where OneNote is a stripped down shell of it's Windows counterpart, I've been searching for a replacement. I think it's time to give org-mode a try once again. I'm not big on this set of documentation though. It's great for a reference, but I would like to see something more engaging that reviewed the features and gave a brief how-to. If anyone has any links, I'd love to explore. One of the things that I liked most about onenote is a canned integration with outlook - from my meeting calendar entry I could click a button and it would start a new note with the title of the meeting, the date/time, a list of attendees, etc. Does anyone do something similar in org-mode for taking meeting notes?

The most important thing when working with text is, for me, consistent keyboard shortcuts. Just CTRL+A, CTRL+E, CTRL+K, CTRL+Y, ALT+D, CTRL-left/right alone get used so frequently in Emacs that in any other editor I immediately try to set things up the same way (thankfully, there seems to always be someone who writes an Emacs mode plugin for almost any IDE). A massive benefit of org mode, then, is that I can write my notes, meeting minutes, TODOs and even latex/pdf papers as well as track time right there in org mode, with consistent shortcuts and consistent emphasis markup. Org-export takes care of producing.md,.pdf,.odt,.html or whatever so that I can communicate with other people. All my org files live in a Dropbox-synced folder. The only thing missing is a mobile app that shows you your agenda in a reasonable format. I've used emacs solely for orgmode over the last year and I'm not sure I'd recommend it whole-heartedly.

Orgmode is great, but the emacs learning curve is steep and unforgiving. It still feels as if I'm faking my way through an ancient language whenever I fumble through keyboard 'shortcuts'. That said, it's incredibly powerful. Wouldn't continue to torture myself if it wasn't. I like the plain text files, the authoring experience (the document feels alive somehow), and I've never been more organized.

I just wish it existed outside emacs! If you're only using Emacs for OrgMode, my answer is an resolute, 'No'. You're far better finding a tool that fits in with your current workflow. The last time we had a post about Emacs, I wrote a rather long winded response, but the summation of it was this: the value in investing in tools like Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, etc is when you can pile as much of your workflow into that tool is possible. The power of Emacs is that it is a completely customizable tool.

It's primary purpose, of course, is to be a text editor, but you can configure it to be an email reader, web browsing client, note taking tool, it can run external commands, etc. It's powerful, and it can literally be the only application you have open. The downfall with Emacs is that integrating it in certain environments, namely Windows, is not a trivial matter. I use Visual Studio, Outlook, and Lync at work. I could configure all of that to run in Emacs, but then I'd be taked with maintaining that in addition to my own work.

Anyone turned off by the ridiculous amount of config required for a todo list, feel free to try out my plaintext productivity 'suite'. It's intended to be used in vim, but do as you please!

Features: todos, timestamps, tagging, calendar, kanban-in-a-text-file (vertical, not horizontal) It was a response to org-mode complexity and the cruft it encourages you to stow away and never look at again, as well as its rather insane amount of features, 95% of which I had no need for. I make some more detailed comments about org-mode in the post linked to from the repo. Not to put you down or discourage you from sharing useful things, but even that much config is too much for me. My.vimrc and.gvimrc are small enough that I have them memorized, and I have no reservations about manually typing things like 'TODO', date/time, tags, or check boxes. Like I said, I don't mean to discourage you, but that's my personal preference.

I'm sure org-mode and the like make some people more productive, but honestly I don't think the (rather small, really) feature set justifies the bloat; and, frankly, I have a tendency to get sucked into a self-inflicted configuration hell, so I'm likely more productive without them. ETA: Looks like you're being downvoted. I have no idea why, given that this is Hacker News, after all, and you've just linked us to a hack of your own. Sometimes I hate this place. Appreciate the response. The org-mode lot can be quote passionate, as much as the proponents of 'the other' editor I mentioned.

TBH the config is not as minimalist as it could be - the autocomplete isn't necessary, nor the archive and save keymappings. Just the syntax, fold and timestamp settings would do - 5 lines? Many would have those set up already.

Anyway, the idea is to be editor-agnostic, even (poor) Windows 10 users could use notepad with its timestamping or Notepad with its folding etc. No discouragement at all - whatever works for you. Manually typing is essentially what the calendar setup I posted 'offers'. It's typically quicker than picking from a date-box to just type 12 - TASK under the correct month.

Completely with you on that front. My main problem with org-mode and taskwarrior etc. Is they are based on the premise that you will have an inordinate number of tasks to manage. Productivity does not that way lie, IMO. I am not into 'folding away' 400 tasks and brain dumping every useless thought I have. Nor am I into being forced to review dozens of time-wasting entries every week.

Being strict with my work tasks/goals/deadlines means I run a lean list - I've run too many crufty ones before to go back there. I just want the computer to automate as much as it can and to augment my wetware, not to give me more work. Also no probs for the downvotes. The comment started with a few + but then they quickly got overruled. It happens, no big deal, I just always prefer to have both sides of a cult presented in my decision-making:).

That's not the question for org-mode - that's the question of using digital vs. Physical for note taking.

And the answer probably depends on person. For me, I went through everything. I've been switching around between paper and digital.

I did GTD on paper, did Bullet Journal, and on the computer side I went through Workflowy, OneNote, using Outlook for tasks and some other things too. I eventually gravitated towards org-mode and stayed there. For me the biggest advantage of org-mode over everything else, paper and digital alike, is its speed and flexibility. I ultimately dislike physical note-taking because my handwriting sucks. And other computer tools lack the speed you get from pure keyboard interface, and the flexibility of org-mode's Agenda system. But the same is true of onenote or evernote.

Temporary .spacemacs Configuration File For Mac Mac

With OneNote and evernote you can't (literally) grep through your notes (yay cloud storage, the only thing worse than propertiary formats). They don't integrate all that well with other software, and you can't refile quickly. Way too much clicking in both to do even simplest of tasks, compared to Emacs-powered org-mode, where everything is keyboard driven, and you can do things affecting multiple files simultaneously from the agenda buffer. About the only places where OneNote & Evernote beat org-mode is the convenience of embedding rich media in notes (in org-mode you have to store files separately and embed links, though there are ways to make e.g.

Linked images to display inline) and mobile interface. Mobile apps for interaction with org-mode are sadly subpar at the moment. That's why in my response I avoided saying that one is better than other.

It totally depends on your situation and use cases. There's tons of stuff that is about infinitely more convenient to do with paper than with computers (even tablets).

Fast arbitrary drawing, fast arbitrary coloring, being able to get a full overview quicker (if you use a binder, just take out all your notes and spread them on your desk - even three 4k screens won't beat that), etc. But nobody says you have to stick to one and only system for everything. Personally, I still make a lot of designs on paper - but I store tasks and project notes in a digital form. For me anyway, it's the same reason I like Lisp more than other languages. Pairing with a client the other day, she remarked that she had a hard time following what I was doing.

This is because when I write Lisp I usually don't go into it with a plan, because I don't know what I'm going to write yet. So I just keep writing 'the next thing,' and at the end, presto, a working program! Org-mode is like that in its relationship w/notebooks. If you know what you're writing, a notebook probably is better, b/c it's easy to carry, doesn't run out of battery, has no load time, etc. But if (like me) your notebooks have a lot of things half-started, scratched out, and replaced, well, then, org-mode may be for you! Tried to switch to vim/Emacs repeatedly for more than 10 years, never understood the reason of cryptic commands and shortcuts, that was OK 25 years ago, but since then, keyboards got, say, arrow keys.

Alt-F is 'forward one word'? OK, can be memorized, but there is Alt-right arrow for everything else, much more intuitive. Shortcuts and their relationships are part of the UI, and it's horrible for Emacs. It's the same as some people saying 'syntax doesn't matter in programming languages', to which I say BS. Some things are inherently easy to learn and to use, because they map to innate categories (e.g. Direction and size). And some things are arbitrary and require memorization.

And don't get me started on videogames. When I was still playing them, I was constantly remapping keys. One can say: 'OK then, it's Emacs, you can remap the keys any way you want'. And believe me, I tried. And struggled with keymapping conflicts here and there (including Ergoemacs).

I adore the idea of absolute configurability. I like how Emacs is built and what amount of extensions is available.

I just can't use it, no matter how I tried. Video game controllers are designed to be intuitive, with many discarded attempts, lots of A/B testing and ergonomic tests. One can't say it about Emacs default layout, it is pretty much arbitrary (unlike videogame controllers). There are some games requiring memorizing controls on keyboard, like flight sims.

For me, those were impossible to play, until I bought flight stick hardware, which is designed much better. And I have quite good working memory; I remember all my credit card numbers, more than 100 phone numbers, etc. — which allows me to be a decent software engineer. But I can't recognize faces, and I have problems with some tactile combinations (not all; I can blind type). But vim and Emacs are really hard to me for some reason. Vim and Emacs are two different beasts.

My personal setup is using Spacemacs, after having my own clumsy customization on both Vim and Emacs. So now I use Emacs with Vim keybindings. Spacemacs has been suggested many many times in similar threads. I also suggest you give it a try, as its keybindings are very user friendly and documentation is good. And per your specific example: Vim has a great system to move around text. You just need to get used to it, but basically, you'll be executing 'motions', where you're telling the software exactly what you want to do using very few keypresses. Anything can look cryptic if you don't take the time to learn it!

Trust us, it's worth your while! You are truly limiting yourself by only using arrow keys. You'll quickly stop using them at all in Vim, while gaining productivity quickly. And if you don't like Vim per se, some software supports Vim keybindings.

I have installed Emacs (emacs-plus) via Homebrew on my Mac. My problem is that if I in the Finder chooses 'open with' - Emacs, Emacs open all right, but its not always the right file that is opened! Sometimes it's the right file, sometimes it's a file i have edited sometimes in the past. What could be wrong? Any hint to debugging this problem? Extra info:. The wrong file that's opened is typically the last i have edited/closed.

The correct file is not opened in any buffers (before or after). Second time i choose 'open with', the correct file is opened. After restart of Emacs, the problem disappears for some time. Check the buffer-list to see if your file is open, but not being displayed. M-x list-buffers or C-x C-b. I assume you have an open Emacs in the background and your concern is that the file being opened in Finder is not being displayed, but it may in fact be open somewhere in Emacs.

Temporary .spacemacs Configuration File For Mac Pro

You may also wish to try a plain old Emacs built -with-ns (for OSX) without the Homebrew stuff and see if everything works as expected: Adding a Homebrew to the equation can complicate the diagnosis. Select the proper Emacs application when using open-with: Other. – Aug 10 '16 at 6:18. If you haven't rebooted your computer in the last century, please reboot. You would be surprised how many people never reboot their Mac. Also, restart Emacs please.

Temporary .spacemacs Configuration File For Mac

And, you might as well disable all the spacemacs stuff to eliminate that from part of the equation when diagnosing the problem - no need to complicate the diagnosis by enabling spacemacs. In a nutshell, you want to try things with zero user-configuration - aka Emacs -Q If everything works okay with zero user-configuration, then recursively bisect your customizations by commenting sutff out and restarting Emacs. – Aug 10 '16 at 6:26.