Ask HN: What are the most promising transformative tools for thought today?

7 points·nicksont··5 comments

Saw a post[0] last year about this and wanted to revisit it.

For those of you not aware of what transformative tools for thought are, see this article[1].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240875

[1]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/

Not to beat a dead horse, but Org Mode and Emacs have been a revolution in how I interface with my computers. It’s the closest we have to a BMI as long as your hands are dexterous enough. In the spirit of equine metaphors, I would only add that you can show a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

What does org mode do?

something for emacs

https://orgmode.org/

lots of people love it (mostly ancients and nerds)

i'm more of an obsidian guy, just simple markdown notes.

I know what it does but not exactly why are people still excited about it nowadays. I know that folks "run their life" in it.

I had to stop using Emacs because it hurts my wrists (and I'd never stop configuring it). I remember when VSCode came out I started being much more productive, since I made some strong effort to just use it.

I actually found Org Mode accidentally because the folding / unfolding behaviour is copied in the app workflowy https://workflowy.com/features/

I moved my note taking to spacemacs https://www.spacemacs.org/ and then I moved to a standard emacs install with a minimal init.el

The magic for me with org-mode is the org-keyword states, time stamps, org-agenda, and fold/unfold.

Once you are dialed in to your keyboard shortcuts you can spend hours in emacs without touching your mouse, writing, thinking, and the ergonomic to organise those thoughts are just great.

I will say I still use vscode for actual coding, and I prefer the multi line / multi cursor visual editing in vscode over Evil/Vim visual mode multi line editing.

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