Peter Prevos has a nice post in his using Emacs to be more productive series. The post, Ricing Org Mode: A Beautiful Writing Environment, discusses how to make the org-mode buffer “prettier.” It’s very much like Abhinav Tushar’s post that I wrote about back in 2018.
As I said in that previous post, I always find this kind of thing interesting but I’m unlikely to replicate the setup on my systems. That may be because I have old-timey sensibilities but I think it’s because I really, truly believe in and prefer markup systems for entering text. If you use org-mode for writing your posts/articles/books, you’re making the decision that you prefer the control and advantages that plain text provides over the WYSIWYG bling of word processors such as Word.
If you’re one of those people, why would you want the distractions that a semi-WYSIWYG setup brings? To me, it means that the text is harder to edit. If you hide the markers for, say, italic text, it’s that much harder to remove the italics or change it to something else such as bold. The same applies to replacing the header stars with “fancy bullets.” They make it that much harder to interpolate another subtree.
But, of course, that’s just me. Other people may prefer such things and, as always, Emacs lets you have it your way. And to be honest, I do use some of his suggestions. I like displaying in-line images and turning on prettify entities so that rudimentary mathematics is displayed correctly.
Still, I can’t help but feel that if you want to write in markup, then use markup. On the other hand, to channel DMR, if you want WYSIWYG, you know where to find it. If you disagree, take a look at Prevos’ post to see how you can make things look prettier.