Over at the Emacs subreddit, Low_Money_633 has a paean to Org mode. That’s nothing new, of course. Many of us are long time, devout Org mode fans. What struck me about Low_Money_633’s praise was his description of it as “the most powerful test editor”.
At first, I thought that an odd characterization. It is Emacs, after all, that is the editor. Org is simply, in Emacs parlance, a major mode. But after a little thought, I began to appreciate his characterization. If you use Emacs primarily to write prose—as opposed to code—it’s easy to think of Org mode as what Emacs is really about. Emacs is simply the foundation upon which Org is built. It’s raison d’être is to support Org mode.
The thing about writing in Org mode, as Low_Money_633 and the commenters point out, is that it’s all plain text. That means that files tens of thousands of lines long are only a few megabytes as opposed to the several gigabytes that something like Word would take. It also means that the files can live happily in something like Git where previous versions are instantly available when they’re needed.
I’ve reached the point where I write more prose than code in Emacs so I understand Low_Money_633’s point of view. That’s the thing about Emacs: it can adapt itself to be just what you need to the point that you can forget what’s happening under the covers.
As I’ve said before, when I’m writing, regardless of the type of writing, I’m almost certainly using Emacs. That’s because using anything else is too painful.