Re: org-adapt-indentation default should be nil [legibility 3/6]

[Texas Cyberthal <texas.cyberthal@gmail.com>]

> the default settings do not put blank lines between headings and their entry text,

I don't know what this means. Plain Emacs behaves the same way
Spacemacs does in this regard. Insertion of a blank line after a
heading is voluntary but standrd. Insertion of a blank line between
the current non-empty line and a new heading is automatic. The fact
that the latter looks nice tends to make users do the former.

> without any indentation, headings and entry text on varying levels tends to blend together, making for very poor readability.

If the goal is to read the body text of headings, then deeply
indenting it is contrary to the goal. If the goal is to see the depth
of headings, then the bodies should be folded. If folded mode doesn't
convey sufficient information, the solution is to rewrite the heading
titles to better summarize the body text.

I never use org-adapt-indentation and have no readability issues. Out
of curiosity, I tried to turn it on just now. There's no toggle for
it, even though it's a buffer-local variable. This suggests it's not
useful, since apparently nobody who's turned it off cares to turn it
on again.

> No one is "good at" Emacs and Org when they first come to it.

UI difficulty is exponential, not linear. The more initially difficult
the Emacs UI is acknowledged to be, the more important it is to reduce
that difficulty with noob-friendly defaults, so that they can
eventually reach the point of elitist unconcern for noobs.

The problem with aiming software at noobs is ruining the expert
experience. Changing defaults doesn't ruin expert experience because
experts have configuration management. Noob friendly defaults
increases the likelihood there is a long term for them. Emacs' biggest
barrier to adoption is acclimatization. I just read a GTD thread in
which they all agreed Org was too hard to be worth learning, including
the guy advocating it:

https://forum.gettingthingsdone.com/threads/emacs-org-mode-is-the-perfect-tool-for-gtd.15028/page-2

To be clear, this is the biggest GTD forum, which Org is the best
implementation of, and it seems most of them are using digital GTD
tools.