[grogenaut]

personally this article would work way better for me with a set of animated gifs instead of turning into a wall of text. And I'd love to see his workflows for what he puts in his different orgs to help with context switching. as I get more senior I'm switching tasks even more and more.

[joshstella]

Author of blog post here. I take your point on being more accessible, and you're right about the wall of text. I didn't think anyone would care about my little paen to emacs, and this is one evening's work from a couple years ago.

Regarding organization, I don't have much of a system, other than the filesystem under ~/org with a handful of directories. Works just fine for me. It's more about not-caring than caring, regarding organization of information. We really shouldn't have to organize this stuff. Emacs + org-mode allows me to not care. I love that.

[yosamino]

In case you did not know about this tool: https://asciinema.org/ is a very pretty way to create gif-like presentations from terminal sessions.

No affiliation, I just think it's really neat.

[grogenaut]

thanks for the follow up. I do appreciate the article and it's very well written for a one evening work.

So is there somthing inherent in org mode that just makes a pile of concurrent projects in a directory usable? eg do you just have project plans and mind maps for each "idea" or "product" in your org directory named by idea or is there just one file? or it doesn't matter and you just basically grep to find where you need to be?

[pagnol]

I'm sure you'd love to live in the world of Fahrenheit 451, there they have no 'walls of text' and only big tv screens with colorful images, multiple per room.

[grogenaut]

I know, don't feed the trolls. Look, I'm a software engineer, likely like you. I read walls of text all day. However having an engineer provide an explanatory narrative of how they use a terminal ide like emacs, which is still a GUI for the most part, is very difficult and takes a lot of understanding. However some of these things can be done in 3 seconds in an animated gif or 20 minutes in a bad youtube video.

And I do have basically the giant tv screens at my desk filling 120 degrees of vision except they're called monitors and there are 7 of them, almost entirely filled with text... except the one that plays baseball all day.

My main problem with learning emacs is usually any explanation from people tries to describe it in words and it's hard to grok, or they do videos but have customized the keyboards bindings so I have no clue how to repeat or translate their magic into operations on my machine. Every time I give it a good go, about once a year for a week, I get going pretty good but then have to really jump back into an urgent task and go back to the tools I know because at the end of the day what I need to do is get work done, not learn emacs. And so I forget. As a counter example I picked up Visual Studio 2017 in about a day having not used anything newer than 2008 in years. VS Code or Sublime were mere minutes. Emacs and vim, I've got basic proficency in them but even after multiple months of total trying with each over 20 year career, they haven't stuck beyond basic git commit editing.

Finally, what a lot of devs don't get, is your logical assertion that emacs or vim or what have you "Is just better" doesn't really resonate with people, even other engineers (who are born skeptics). What resonates with them are examples of WHY it's good, ones they can innately understand. It, like any Don Draper ad, is about translating the fundamentals to another person as succinctly as possible. Like any sales funnel, any friction is going to turn people off. So if you really want to sell Emacs or Vim or any other gospel, have a good sales pitch and don't get mad at people when they give feedback because "they're too much of a mouth breather like those folks in Farenheit 451 to realize what they're not getting".