Always heard about org mode but was intimidated by emacs when I could barely manage vi/vim (sorry guys). Installed a plugin for org-mode for Sublime Text today and… shit, why didn’t I try this sooner?
I have thousands of text files with horrible organization, thrown around multiple directories, no common naming scheme, no hierarchy, no unified notation, just ramblings and a barely marginal attempt at organization using ===
as title markers. I have links and ideas buried deep and I didn’t want to use a third party tool “just for managing text”.
Well, my eyes are open, and thus I’m euphoric, enlightened by its brilliance. I must rewrite all my stuff in org-mode.
Org mode changed my fucking life! I looked into using emacs as a simple markdown editor when I was doing a creative writing course and discovered org mode. 4 years later and I never leave emacs, everything is done through emacs and org mode. I even use it as my window manager (exwm). I bought an old chromebook to turn into an emacs machine and it’s so good. It’s an operating system and I don’t like using a computer without it.
Some things for you to look into that I now can’t live without:
Elfeed
Org-capture and capture templates
Dired
EXWM
Syncthing (not a part of emacs but means I don’t have to use closed source cloud backups)
I passionately love emacs. At first I thought all they shortcuts and keybindings were a bit insane but they are second nature to me at this point. Emacs has also saved me lots of money that I would have spent on silly writing apps and aids.
the thing that stops me from putting my whole life in emacs is how many things block the main render thread… jfc emacs needs a multithreaded rewrite. I still use emacs for /almost/ everything though.
fun fact: you can browse lemmy from emacs
Welcome to emacs, you’re here forever.
There used to be an awesome vi tutorial page at the University of Hawaii but it’s no longer there. You might find it archived on the internet archive way back though.
Just out of curiosity, do you know of a good resource for learning awk, sed, and grep?
There are two really good O’Reilly books: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sed-awk/1565922255/ and https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-regular-expressions/0596528124/ (regex in general)
– not sure if these are still available as standalone pdfs; but back in the day I worked through them in part, and they were extremely helpful.