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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I just don't want to touch emacs with a ten-foot pole. Last I tried, even the most «user-friendly» setups of Emacs+org-mode felt flaky, slow to start, and plain ugly – bad at handling multimedia, bad at rendering, bad even at smooth scrolling, with a lot of dicking around .emacs to get anything done well. It was clear that I need to dig into Emacs Lisp and build my tools from the ground up. I also don't like the concept of buffers and frames as separate from tabs and windows; it makes sense in the context of programming, but I seriously don't need an IDE in a pure note-taking tool.

If you like emacs, you definitely should use org mode. It is conceptually elegant and of course open source. Even core features of org mode like the agenda view are very good, AFAIK impossible to replicate in Obsidian (to some extent possible in Notion), and I know that's only scratching the surface.