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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

That's a very interesting investigation. However, perhaps computing has lost its way, when a production system uses emulators of 1970s terminals to run a 1970s editor on a version of a 1970s operating system. I really think that we're stuck in a local maximum and there are probably much better ways to do things. Our computers are millions of times more powerful now, but we're still doing things the same way as literally half a century ago.

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People may be stuck in what they think is a local maximum. I ditched emacs close to 20 years ago (for jEdit, later Sublime and finally IntelliJ) and have never regretted it in the slightest.

I don't want my editor to read usenet or play solitaire. I want it to edit text and surface useful contextual information, and otherwise stay out of the way and let me devote my mental energy to the task at hand and not futzing with the damn editor config.

>surface useful contextual information

Emacs with Org-mode it's far more than an editor or a mail/usenet/elisp interpreter.

It's literally what you want.

I really want to use Orgmode (or maybe something like Neorg/Vimviki for vim), but the biggest issue with all of those things is that somehow, there still isn't a proper mobile app for any of them. No, I don't want a simple TODO app that uses Orgmode under the hood. I want an actual app for Orgmode, something which works like Obsidian or Logseq. (In fact, Logseq supports orgmode, but that support is very limited and sometimes incompatible with actual Orgmode)

I don't understand how there are so many passionate users of Orgmode yet apparently not a single one of them is a mobile developer who sometimes takes notes on their phone.

No, that's exactly what I don't want.

I want to edit code. Nothing else.

Org-mode has a 'babel' programming mode. You can code and append snippets, docummentations, charts, output and anything you want.

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html

By contextual data I’m really just talking about things like being able to auto complete from it only the code base, but associated sql schemas as well. Or presenting code navigation as a sorted hierarchy of classes, functions, etc. Lazy human want computer do work.

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-...

With Org you can export that into a PDF, html5 files, whatever.

What he wants is to connect his editor to an SQL database and have TAB completion in a string for keys and tables in that database. He wants to be able to traverse a codebase by classes rather than by file. Basically he wants Smalltalk.

I'm pretty sure Emacs could do that even with org-mode.

> I ditched emacs close to 20 years ago (for jEdit, later Sublime and finally IntelliJ) and have never regretted it in the slightest.

In that time I've carried on using Emacs, and have regretted it several times ;)

However, Emacs has come on a lot. It's much easier to configure than it used to be, and LSP has brought its semantic features back into the range of other editors. Its text processing abilities have always been stellar and far outshone anything else I've tried.

I'm very happy I stuck with it. I've kept many years of muscle memory and tricks and avoided having to reconfigure 3 different editors. Plus there are killer features like magit and org-mode.

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