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by t_mann 306 days ago
While I'm not an Emacs aficionado and I find some of the stuff that people squeeze into Emacs weird [0], I have to vouch for OP here. It's a front end for ffmpeg. ffmpeg is a text-based utility and Emacs is a text editor. That actually makes sense. And judging by the screengrab it's a lot more ergonomic than plain ffmpeg. If I were an Emacs user I'd definitely consider using this, and it makes me kind of jealous.

[0] recent example from here: a proto social network that runs via org-files-over-http (as if we didn't have a markup language designed for http already) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889354
1 comments
iLemming 305 days ago
> if we didn't have a markup language designed for http already

Org-mode is far more than just a markup. It is executable - you can have executable code-blocks (in different languages) that interact with one another. It is interactive - there are TODO items, agendas, and scheduling that integrate with your workflow. It has built-in calendar, deadlines, and habit tracking. It has spreadsheets with calculations, like in Excel. It is insanely programmable. I use it for various things, even some unexpected like managing my dotfiles - simpler and more predictable than Nix or Stowed, org-mode creates an 'immutable' version of my system.

Sure, it is also a markup, but the markup is just the interface to a much richer computational document model.

So, what you're finding to be weird is only because you are unfamiliar with it. It is in fact highly pragmatic, and there's nothing weird about it; you just have not experienced that firsthand, and that's alright.

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t_mann 305 days ago
I get that Org-mode is extremely powerful, but I was talking about Org-social specifically. Take a look at the spec, does it use much programmability? To me it looks like just annotating a bunch of metadata plus a unique ID (which is actually just a timestamp, which seems problematic to me for a number of reasons, eg tracking edits, not being necessarily unique,...).
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iLemming 305 days ago
I don't understand what you're saying. If everyone on the team uses Excel to manipulate data and they share it around in .xlsx files, you wouldn't tell them "why not .csv?", right?
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t_mann 305 days ago
I'd say it's more like they're sending around csv tables in the body of emails and then writing VBA scripts to copy them into Excel. In that case, yeah, I might mention that there are better ways to do it.
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