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Comment by kickingvegas | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I used but never liked LaTeX and only because I needed a good way to deal with expressing mathematics. However, using org-mode and exporting to LaTeX is a winning combo for me. With org-mode, I can focus on writing and not typesetting.

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> However, using org-mode and exporting to LaTeX is a winning combo for me.

Yeah there are plenty of relatively easy to use lightweight markup languages which can generate LaTeX[0]. If you don't need the specific properties of LaTeX but want the option of LaTeX-typeset output, use something else and compile to PDF through LaTeX.

[0] because Pandoc generates LaTeX even if the reference implementation doesn't.

You know, for over a decade I've basically lived in vim & the shell. But I continually hear good things about org-mode and magit. Should I just embrace my destiny turn to the dark side?

Would not frame it as “destiny” or “dark”, but using org-mode has been spectacularly transforming and guiding for how I plan/design software today. Definitely worth trying out https://orgmode.org/features.html

I still don't really understand what the value proposition of org-mode is. What is your personal workflow like?

Okay, here's a typical day with org-mode for me. Start out the day entering a daily journal, listing out all the TODO items and scheduling them so I can see them in org-agenda. A subset of those TODOs are meetings, of which I'll use the folding outline editor to write an agenda and notes. Given that I work remotely now near 100% of the time, I typically share my screen to go over the agenda. Frequently, I'll need to diagram something to share with the team. For that I use org-babel to write plantuml or graphviz and render the output (like a sequence or class diagram or flow chart) and use that to drive design discussion with the team. Note that all of this is still within GUI emacs in single buffer (text and images). At my work we use Confluence and Jira, so I use org-export to publish the above work to Jira markup (tables, headings, lists, typeface styles). Other TODO items are the tasks I do during the day; there I use org-mode to capture my notes/thoughts. Most times, I'll use org tables to help organize tabular data (which happens a lot) and org-babel to run both python and bash commands. In addition I'll use source blocks to capture code snippets (typically Swift nowawdays) and random commands. I'll also store links that I run across through the course of day. Note again, I'm still working out of that same buffer. With emacs-client, I remote from my iPad into that same buffer and edit away. End of the day, I commit my org-mode file into my notes repo using magit. Occasionally, I'll use org-mode to write a presentation using reveal.js or typeset documentatation to push through LaTeX. Nearly all my documentation starts out as an org file. YMMV, but org-mode has completely transformed how I work now.

Sure. You can even use evil if you can't bear chording.

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