Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

raddleboy OP wrote

i read it. But could you explain how exactly does it help me. I'll have to read it again.

4

nulloperation wrote

Is there a way that i can add images and other items all the while keeping that document manageable and searchable?

Yes. Org Mode uses hyperlinks though, so you'd have to not shuffle them around, or if you do, provide a symlink to wherever you put the image folder. Org Mode makes text navigation easier by folding: You can fold sections by headlines and subheadlines, so kinda zoom out and in of the document structure. You could use any folding extension for your favourite text editor, like markdown folding for vim or whatever text editor you enjoy. I personally think that folding is super helpful when structuring documents of any size. The idea with Org Mode (and the like) is just to keep everything in one large text file, rather than lots of entries (like, say a Wiki) in possibly deeply nested subfolder hierarchy.

Another option for document layout with a huge amount of images is Scribus. It works well will hundreds of images without demanding much RAM, even though it is WISYWIG (unlike Org Mode). Scribus built-in text editing is very limited, but is awesome at typesetting longer texts when imported.

4

[deleted] wrote

4

moonlune wrote (edited )

org mode is a little more than a emacs specific markup language.

The key difference with other markup languages ones is that it's meant to be interactive, it's almost its own program ( I think the whole document is inside the REPL, so whatever you write gets executed). For example you can do spreadsheets and talbes, and have dates (like, if you write "next week", it'll automatically convert it to date+7) and an easy handling of tasks (write TODO and when you've done your task, it'll write DONE with the date and completion time, + task hierarchies).

It's very good for writing in documents with which you want to interact often, like for short note taking and as an agenda and todo list. I used it in a lab while doing experiments over several months and talking to my colleagues and it was quite handy for organizing my tasks and notes and pretty much everything.

4

nulloperation wrote (edited )

It's terrible use vim /s

this but without the "/s", and then using pandoc (and hence, LaTeX) for pdf (or msword or whatevs) export of your markdown text file, because OP was talking about there being lots of images. or, you use weasyprint if you don't like pandoc. or apple's webkit even. then, when you find a good one, assign a good keybinding for it in vim, to make the pdf and open it in a pdf viewer (mupdf is very lightweight).

3

[deleted] wrote (edited )

3

nulloperation wrote

Edit: also are you arguing against yourself about vim being better than emacs?

Well, OP was asking about good text editors, and I wanted to be impartial. But it's also more complicated than vi(m) vs emacs, e.g. when considering evil (a decent implementation of vi(m) in emacs).

I think it comes down to whether you prefer using one monolithic program where you have all your files open (which is arguably the emacs way), or several instances of do one thing and do it well-style programs (which I think vim is more suited for).

Take email: In emacs, you'd open the email client inside emacs; whereas with vim, you'd have mutt spawn a vim for composing or replying to messages.

I really want to like emacs as I'd take any lisp any day over vimscript, python or lua. Emacs clearly has better at syntax highlighting, especially stuff like JS inside HTML, and Org Mode is killer feature, both for code folding, but also for running code snippets in any language. Emacs is objectively better written software, but those utterly indescribably horrifyingly messed up keybindings are so deeply embedded in emacs that it's beyond repair.

When I lost my emacs config file, I switched back to vim again, yet I'm still looking for decent alternatives to Org Mode and to ediprolog.

3