Re: Difficulty of using Org mode

[Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen@damtp.cam.ac.uk>]

As Yihui was following up to an email of mine about Org mode on the ESS
(emacs speaks statistics list), I will email him to find out if I can
see what issues he had.  For the record: I also found learning Org mode
quite challenging, and I consider myself a diehard Emacs person.  I
guess if you were to ask me what I found difficult, was that it was
quite overwhelming knowing where to start.  (So I started small by
learning the agenda features...)

Stephen


Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com> writes:

> Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>>Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hi, folks.  Just FYI:
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>>>From: Yihui Xie <xie@yihui.name>
>>>>To: Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen@damtp.cam.ac.uk>
>>>>Cc: ESS-help@r-project.org
>>>>Sent: Saturday, June 2, 2012 3:08 PM
>>>>Subject: Re: [ESS] knitr
>>>>
>>>>There is no point comparing markdown with org mode, and the answer
>>>>will be definitely this: org mode can beat markdown almost everywhere;
>>>>they are not even comparable. The point is that markdown was not
>>>>designed to provide new features; it was designed to be simple so it
>>>>intentionally discarded lots of features and people can learn it
>>>>quickly. I have tried a few times to learn org mode, and it is just
>>>>too complicated for me.
>>
>> Well, it all boils down to disambiguate what "learning Org" means.
>>
>
>> It is hard to say just from the message above.  If you can, please redirect
>> the OP to this list so that he feels guided in tasks he wants to do with
>> Org.
>
> Hi, Bastien.  I don't know this guy, but I don't think he's *trying* to learn
> Org mode at this point.  He seems to be a very capable guy:
>
>     http://yihui.name/
>
> and is evidently the author of the R package "knitr" for literate programming.
>
> I was just struck by the fact that a person of his evident ability would give
> up on Org mode.  I can't say it has been all that easy for me to use Org mode,
> and I'm sure there are Avogadro's number of things I still don't know about
> it, but I've never viewed it is being *that* difficult.  Probably I've been
> spoiled by all the help I've gotten from this enormously useful list.
>
> There's no real action item for anybody here.  I speculate that this guy might
> just have had more fun writing his own package than in learning somebody
> else's.  But I don't see how it could hurt for the Org-mode community to keep
> an eye out for usability issues.
>
> -- Mike