A few months ago I wrote about Luke Smith’s challenge for others to make a video convincing him to use Emacs. Among those who responded was JimKD who produced a very nice video that showcased some of the great features of Emacs. I just saw a reference to the video and watched it again. I vaguely remembered seeing it before but couldn’t remember if I’d written about it until I searched my Irreal archive. Since it was worth watching again and since there are new pointers to it, I decided I’d revisit it.
Smith is (or was) getting ready to write his thesis so one of the things he was looking for in an editor was features that made writing easy. JimKD emphasized that aspect of Emacs in his video. He begins by bringing up a buffer containing a \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) document and shows how it is easy to navigate to different parts of the document, show and operate on two views of the document, and compile or view the document as a PDF file. When I’m using a markup language to write, I find I often want to check the result to ensure that the markup produced the result I wanted so the preview function is important to me and probably most folks using non-trivial markup.
JimKD then moves to Org mode. His discussion is mostly focused on Org’s table editor. He shows how an Org table can behave like a spreadsheet while still being in plain text. JimKD emphasizes how important that plain text aspect is: you can always read your data even if the software that produced it disappears for some reason.
The video is just over 25 minutes but it’s interesting and well worth the time to watch it. If you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it for a while, take a look.