Beginning to see the light with org-mode

Posted by Prion
Dec 22, 2015 at 09:07 PM

Disclaimer: I am a scientist and my interest in emacs or vim besides some general dabbling at text is really just driven by org mode.
If you are on the fence regarding org-mode and have been put off by the seemingly disparate nature of the various contributions to this endeavour, you may at least be congratulated for your good judgment. That said, there are some initiatives that make it much easier to start and one of the more notable ones is spacemacs (https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs). Unlike other starter packages, which represent one setup that works for its creator, this one has many developers and whilst prolific, is still focused.

To call it a starter package is an understatement, although you can treat it as one. It has many sane defaults and for the most part works out of the box. On the Mac it is much nicer looking despite my previous attempts to make Emacs look nicer, this one just does and supports themes that can be swapped easily.

Under the skin, it marries the power of Emacs to the modal editing philosophy of Vim (but only if you let it). This may not sound like much but if you are like me, remembering all those arcane keystrokes of pure Emacs that can very easily involve six keystroke combinations to invoke a single function can be too much very easily. They are all still there but much more accessible now by letting you switch between command mode and editing mode.
Don’t want to unlearn Cmd-S for saving, Cmd-V for pasting because it is too deep in your muscle memory? Just activate this and many other defaults by activating the OS X layer in your configuration file by simply uncommenting it. You can always include more powerful Emacs or Vim editing commands later on once you have built some confidence.

You only remember part of the name for a command that may be useful (or simply guessing one like “had something to do with org mode tables and column justification or was it alignment”)? Just type “SPC : org table” without the quotes and up pops the so-called helm mode that live-filters the 4000 or so commands. Better still, it will not be perturbed by occasional typos and also present fuzzy hits. Very, very useful.

But what does a function X really do? “SPC h d f” (think help describe function), again, there is helm’s fuzzy matching algorithm that let’s you just type the most unique parts of a function’s name and still give you the result.

Don’t remember what a certain keystroke does? “SPC h d k” to the rescue (think help describe key) followed by the keystroke you want to learn something about. The cool thing here is that it will tell you which function is actually tied to the key even if you have modified the keybinding, so all the googling in the world would give you a consistent but wrong answer (for your modified setup).

And so on.
Some of ingredients are spacemacs, some emacs functions, some are collections of little modes and modules that one could find somewhere on the internet and (with some luck) get to work on vanilla emacs, but spacemacs combines many useful ones in a single, remarkably streamlined package. Opinionated, but not dogmatic. Combining the best of emacs and vim may make the purist cringe (as will the inclusion of the OS X keystrokes) but if you simply want it to work and become productive it does a very good job.

Until spacemacs, I have had many unsuccessful attempts at making org-mode work for me, all of which failed because ultimately deadlines got in the way and I simply did not have the time to build the proficiency to get the work done, at least not in emacs org-mode. Utterly defeated I copied and pasted into a software that may have been inferior but better known to me.

I don’t know how it will turn out this time but Spacemacs has for me altered the equation significantly and I am loving it. Give it a try if you will but don’t come running to me asking questions….I am NOT an expert, not yet, ask again in some decades.

Sorry for the long post
Prion