Irreal

Dominik Tarnowski gives us 15 reasons to use Emacs and says that VS Code has nothing on Emacs. He’s a Doom Emacs user but everything he says other than the particular keystrokes apply to any flavor. Another possible title for his post would have been Emacs’ Killer Apps because most of the post is about those killer apps. People can differ on what the Emacs killer apps are but pretty much everyone agrees that Org-mode and Magit are on the list.

Most of the post is devoted to Org-mode and a small amount of Magit. He’s got animated GIFS to illustrate many of points he makes so it’s pretty easy to follow along. Rather than reiterating Tarnowski’s list of outstanding Emacs features, I’ll let you check out the post yourselves.

I disagree with his conclusion that “…Emacs out of the box is simply bad.” What he probably means is something like “it doesn’t look modern enough” but vanilla Emacs is powerful out of the box with a lot of functionality already there. To be sure, most users will add packages for even more functionality but I live happily with the default Emacs look other than changing the white background to “oldlace” (a very light tan) to make the contrast a bit easier on my eyes. Of course, if bling is important to you, Emacs can do that too. As always, it lets you have it your way.

Gregory J Stein has another interesting post on Emacs and Org Mode. This time it’s about how he leverages Org Mode to organize his life and workflow. It’s basically an update to his 2016 post on the same subject. This time he has a lengthy introduction that explains his goals and places his workflow in the context of the Getting Things Done method.

His workflow is a lot like mine except that I put most things into my engineering notebook/journal file including a record of my daily activities, phone calls, and discovery of things worth remembering. As Stein says, his setup works well for him but may not be exactly right for anyone else. Still, it’s a nice basis for anyone who wants to organize his life.

Stein says that his system transformed his life and enables him to plan for the future as well as manage his day-to-day activities. Take a look at his post and see if there’s something in there for you too.

Over at Opensource.com, Peter Prevos has a nice post on how to write LaTeX documents with Org mode. This is an advantage, he says, because it allows the writer to concentrate on the content of what they’re writing rather than worrying about LaTeX syntax or what the final result will look like.

Although making things simpler for beginners by using Emacs may seem counterintuitive, Prevos makes a good case for it. First, as already mentioned, it eliminates the need to be fluent in LaTeX. The simple Org syntax along with the fairly intuitive LaTeX math notation makes typing even technical documents easy.

Second, there’s no need to master Emacs either. As Prevos says, Emacs is only hard to learn when you reach the stage where you want to fine tune things. Beginners can simply accept vanilla Emacs and learn the finer points as they go along.

Finally, the document can be fine tuned by adding custom bits of LaTeX to either the header or a code block. This is easy to do after the document is mostly written and looking up arcane bits of LaTeX syntax won’t interfere with the flow of content creation.

There are a couple of miner mistakes in the post that are hardly worth mentioning since they don’t affect Prevos’ overall message. First, he calls the Meta key the Mod key and secondly he appears to think that all exporting involves Pandoc. As I say, neither of these is a serious matter and they won’t affect a user’s ability to produce nice documents with Org mode at all.

I like his post because it shows how knowing just a little LaTeX and Emacs is enough to produce beautiful documents easily without having to worry very much about LaTeX syntax.