← Back to context

Comment by nextos

12 hours ago

There are incomplete parsers that cover most of the Org basics. For example, GitHub has one, crafted in Ruby. They use it to render e.g. readme.org files in repositories. It works quite well. I find the Org format very pleasant to work with.

I think the trick with Emacs and Org is to stick to the basics and then only add features or change your configuration very slowly, as needed. I have been using Emacs non-stop for >20 years and my .emacs is just 20 LOC. It's been shrinking, not growing. My goal is to bring it down towards 0 LOC. I have committed a few things upstream to modernize defaults.

Personally, I think the reputation of Org, Emacs, or Nix being hard and complex is undeserved. It's rather a documentation problem. There's no simple documentation to onboard newcomers and show them the basics in a principled way. So it looks like a mess, but it isn't.

5 comments

nextos

Reply
ordu  8 hours ago

> I have been using Emacs non-stop for >20 years and my .emacs is just 20 LOC. It's been shrinking, not growing.

Me too. I mean I'm using Emacs too, and it is 20+ years. I hate it deeply, and I cannot stop hating it because I cannot get away from it. I regret deeply choosing emacs 20+ years ago and spending 20 years to wrap my habits around it.

BTW my .emacs is still growing. I don't know how you manage to have 20 LoC of .emacs, I have a directory .emacs.d and a couple of dozen of files there. They are not large, some of them can be as small as 1 line. The last one I've wrote was dealing with indent of lua code. lua-ts-mode have some relatively simple rules that mostly work, but I was not happy with the result, there are some quirks that just are very inconvenient, and in some cases lua-ts-mode just fail to indent properly. So I fixed them to my taste. This one file is longer than 20 LoC.

Though, I should note, that LLMs make this much simpler. It is very simple to reverse-engineer what there is, and if you can explain the idea how to change the code, LLM can write all the elisp needed. It doesn't work out of the box, of course, and needs to be debugged, still LLM can save an hour or two.

> My goal is to bring it down towards 0 LOC.

You cannot. If you use lua you just cannot, because lua-mode uses indent of 3 spaces. Not 2, not 4, but three. So any lua sources you can find on github and try to edit will not be indented like lua-mode does. I cannot imagine what was going on the mind of the person who had chosen this value. The only possible explanation I have is something like "I want to be not like the others", but it doesn't seem right.

So you need at least to change lua-indent-offset (or lua-ts-indent-offset if you use treesitter), and it will be more than 0 LoC.

  • dotancohen  2 hours ago

    Thou shalt indent to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt indent, and the number of the indentation shall be three. Four shalt thou not indent, neither indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then compose thou thy Holy Lua.

  • db48x  6 hours ago

    :)

    You could customize that variable instead, so that Emacs manages everything for you and you don't have to care that it would look like a line of code if you opened your settings and edited them directly.

cenamus  2 hours ago

Care to share those 20 lines? Because I feel like every time I pick up a new language I need to add 5-10 lines to add some basic hooks and configs