Comment by JackedLisp
2 months ago
Very impressed by Rainer König's Org-Mode tutorial series on YouTube. He manages to keep most episodes under 15min. As you progress the knowledge keeps building slowly. Highly effective. His paid courses are likely even better. During the 1st series He only touched init.el a few times. Opting instead for using Customize functionality. He used the default theme, if you can all it that. Toolbar on and menu bar and he used them during the sessions.
System Crafters tends to mostly do live streams for more a couple of hours. You learn a lot watching them. But many people don't have the patience for that.
Rainer is indeed great and he also published an Udemy course on the topic. I've never tried it, by the time he released it I already was well-versed in Org-mode.
He does a good job of showing some interesting features of Org-mode, yet he doesn't provide any insights of how cross-referencing things in a real workplace scenario may look like, how does Org-mode/Emacs help you to communicate with your colleagues. How it allows you to investigate failing http endpoint or document some investigation where you need to dig into a sql db. How Org integrates with other packages, like Anki, Pomodoro or Noter (for pdf annotations).
Wilson's vids also great, but that too, doesn't work as "marketing material", it's mostly "preaching to the choir" and unlikely to bring attention outside of the Emacs-world, still, those videos are very good.
The point I'm trying to make — there are great videos and tutorials for specific things — Org-mode, text-editing features of Emacs, version control, etc. There aren't many vids to demo "the point of Emacs holistically", with the emphasis on "Always bet on text" https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html, I'm just gonna throw a random quote from that great article: "Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."
That is the greatest selling point of Emacs. That's what actually makes a huge difference. When it comes to manipulating text - fetching, processing, searching through, dicing, slicing, summarizing, converting, publishing, etc. — Emacs truly is the unmatched king of that prose.