[yigitdemirag]

I am surprised that nobody mentioned spacemacs[1] and its org-mode support. If you are used to vim shortcuts but want to give a chance to fully-supported org-mode, you should definitely try spacemacs.

Still, I don't think I am ever going to use spacemacs to write code, but for note-taking(with inline LaTeX preview)/todo/calendar, I am 100% happy with it.

[1] http://spacemacs.org/

[pimeys]

Or if you find spacemacs to be too heavy and confusing, doom emacs is a good alternative with its beautiful Makefile system.

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

[mpwoz]

+1 to this, coming from vim I found spacemacs' defaults pretty painless.

I only use it for org-mode right now, still do most of my heavy editing in other tools but it's already been extremely useful for note-taking and todo tracking.

I can also recommend pandoc[1], I've used it to convert some org-mode documents into various wiki/markdown formats for presenting to others.

[1] https://pandoc.org

[asciimov]

I want to like spacemacs, I really do, but using spacemacs is like having a bipolar cat. One moment it is nice and warm and cuddly, the next moment it's randomly knifing you and trying to assert dominance by missing the box.

[iLemming]

Spacemacs doesn't magically liberate you from having to learn Emacs - it simply makes certain things more obvious, but also it obscures some other things. Be patient with it and you'll be rewarded. Whenever something breaks on my config due to an upstream change (a package gets updated with a breaking change) it usually takes me less than 2 minutes to triage that and find a workaround. It doesn't happen very often and I update packages multiple times a week.

[asciimov]

> Spacemacs doesn't magically liberate you from having to learn Emacs

Understandable, and not an issue for me.

My first issue was that there is an error from the start in the main version. That bug was fixed, but syl20bnr refused to do a hotfix. To make matters worse the main download that a new user gets is 13 months old at this point.

So a new user can either install the hotfix themselves or move to the dev branch. A new user isn't informed that they should just be on the dev branch and that due amount of changes since the last main branch release that the new user is better off deleting everything and starting over straight from the dev branch.

[iLemming]

experienced users know: it's better to be in development branch than in master. Sadly that's is the current state of affairs with Spacemacs. Development branch ironically is more stable - yes, things break sometimes, but they also get fixed rather quickly. AFAIK maintainers currently working on the next stable release and trying to figure out better strategies to move forward.

[mercer]

I mostly use Spacemacs for org-mode, but I've found it quite useful for the occasional remote ssh session (TRAMP). Can highly recommend that.

I'm also considering playing around with the interactive shell, in particular for various scripts and whatnot, and I'm thinking of broadening my horizon a bit more. Could the Emacs experts in here give me some suggestions as to what might be good next steps, alongside the shell stuff?

[cat199]

not an expert, but I'd say coding in any interpreted language would be a good place to to look.

emacs is pretty much jupyter notebook before jupyter notebook was jupyter notebook.