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Comment by justinhj | Hacker News Reader

I’m a long time emacs and org-mode user but I switched to neovim for 90% of my development work. I still use emacs for org-mode and I doubt I would ever use org-mode in neovim because it relies on being implemented in the entire emacs system and the emacs lisp language . Nothing short of embedding emacs on neovim would make it tenable. I have the same problem in the other direction, viper is not a substitute for neovim.

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> I doubt I would ever use org-mode in neovim because it relies on being implemented in the entire emacs system and the emacs lisp language . Nothing short of embedding emacs on neovim would make it tenable.

Uh-oh, this does not make a good commercial for org-mode. Is it really that tightly bound to emacs that it fundamentally cannot be used as a general-purpose editor-agnostic tool?

It would be more fair to say you can’t use it to it’s full potential outside of it’s host since its most useful features are implemented in emacs

Here are two examples: I write a blog in org-mode and publish it to html. This is a built in feature of org mode but to configure it I have some emacs lisp code that handles the configuration. Because that code includes functions to generate output paths and so on it would not translate directly to Neovim. You'd have to rewrite the config in lua. Another example is calculated tables. You can manage tables in org-mode but you can also include emacs lisp code to calculate values based on other cells like a spreadsheet. Again these would need an emacs lisp interpreter and all of the context.

Org mode has a long tail of features. -- So org mode has a similar problem to how vi-emulation in other programs will often miss out on some niche behaviour.

Using org mode as an outliner is likely to be easy in a variety of tools.

A major part of org mode is task management, integrated with an agenda view. The full set of editor interactions would be harder to implement in other editors.

e.g. One feature org mode has is "org babel", which allows running snippets of code, and gluing these together as a way of doing literate programming.

Or e.g. the tables in org mode support spreadsheet calculations.

-- I'd say more that people find many different uses for org mode. That somewhat speaks in favour of org mode as a tool.

> I have the same problem in the other direction, viper is not a substitute for neovim.

You should give Evil a try, people say it's much better than Viper. At the very least Evil emulates Vim, while Viper just emulates vi.

Sorry I think it was evil. As soon as I found one thing that didn’t work I was done

Oh, that's a strict criterion! So not even Vim cuts it for you, it has to be neovim.

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