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Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

I love org-mode, if only I could remember enough emacs to keep using it.

Yeah, well, I had the same problem with Emacs, after I switched to it from Vim. I thought that it was ridiculous to be learning new keys and commands all the time. To avoid it I learned Emacs Lisp, read some of Emacs C code and wrote a few k loc long Emacs config[1] along with a couple of libraries, not to mention installing and customizing hundreds of plugins. I never learned Emacs actually, I just rebound everything in a way that suited me and my memory and reflexes.

So, there you have it. You don't need to learn Emacs at all if don't want to, just learn Emacs Lisp first! Although Org mode specifically has a rather unpleasant API.

[1] https://github.com/piotrklibert/dotemacs_reloaded/tree/maste...

If you do the emacs tutorial (in the menu), you'll find a lot of the ctrl- keystrokes work in osx textboxes, which is surprisingly handy. ctrl-n, next line; ctrl-p, previous line; ctrl-k, cut to end of line, ctrl-y yank the text back (but there's no full kill-ring)

a bunch of them work in bash too, ctrl-r for reverse i-search of your history.

You probably already know more than you think, and learning 10-15 basic commands will get you a whole bunch of utility all over the place.

If your a vim person try evil mode. I hear great things.

I have emacs open with org-mode and evil and use it all the time. It's fantastic. I didn't need to make any configuration changes to org-mode to use it with evil.

Evil mode is still not set up enough like vim for me to use in my every day work, though. There are a few gotchas that are different. So I use vim as well as emacs. I just change windows in tmux when I want to use org mode. The only real downside is memory usage and it is inconvenient if you want to us capture in org mode (because you have to change windows).

I'm slowly setting up Evil to support my workflow. I don't think there is anything I can't do, it's just a matter of implementing it. Rather ironically, I used emacs for 20 years before I switched to vim. I have discovered that I prefer modal editing and having a grammar to describe my edits rather than directly editing things. You would think that I could switch back and forth, but it completely blows me up. I seem to have learned emacs keystrokes and vim keystrokes in different parts of my brain...

I'm curious what things from Evil aren't "enough like vim" for you. I switched over after nearly a decade of loving vim and I feel like it's a better vim than vim itself, shockingly, in the sense that, for example, it's very easy to define new operators, motions, text objects, etc., and that the more popular/essential vim plugins had Evil implementations that worked better than the vim originals. Very rarely did I encounter discrepancies, and when I did, I reported it and it was resolved right away. Evil is an amazing project.

I use emacs with evil-mode. It is great.

I actually don't use org mode much though. It's one of the nicer tools I've tried, but I'm just not an organized person.

Pretty much every organizational tool I've ever tried is really good at helping organized individuals become more organized, but do little to help those who are disorganized.

Most organized people sometimes get disorganized. At those times, if you have all your life in a single (or maximum 2) place, getting back to some level of organizedness becomes possible.

I am extremely disorganized too, and I have seen org mode helps me in the getting back business - though you do have to invest seriously in org mode first to be comfortable enough in it. But org has the answer to this too : org-drill.

Here, write these down:

File->Open

File->Save

File->Quit

Edit->Copy/Cut/Paste

Use cursor keys to navigate the document.

Also;

Options -> Use CUA Keys

Options -> Save Options

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