I don't know whether or not it's a perfect translation, but from his description I would offer "tunnel vision" for Scheuklappen-Effekt.
Emacs is a truly remarkable program, which has painted itself into a corner. There are just too many locked-in architectural decisions to make a complete list, and it's good enough at being what it is to suck up all the oxygen needed to build another text editor which could overcome the 40+ year head start it has on anything else.
Org-mode is the perfect example of what's right and what's wrong with Emacs. It's great, and it's also a weird ad-hoc format, most of what it does shouldn't live in an editor, and if you want to really use it anywhere but inside emacs, good luck to you. Remarkably powerful for a TODO list which evolved sentience!
I'm heavily invested in doing something about all this, but since none of that code is public yet, I should probably stop faffing about on HN and knock off another issue before the weekend arrives...
Thinking of Org as "living in an editor" is the mental mistake that leads to that confusion.
Org is a full blown task manager and note taking application, written for the Emacs platform.
Emacs is a platform much like the JVM. Someone happened to write Minecraft for the JVM, and someone happened to write Org for the Emacs platform.
People have written editors for Emacs (evil-mode is one I like) just as people have written search engines for the JVM (I use ElasticSearch at work.) But you shouldn't say org "lives in an editor" any more than you would say "Minecraft lives in a search engine". They're just two different applications built on the same platform.
Granted, the Org application reuses much more code and integrates better with the editors available for Emacs, making the comparison a bit odd, but I'm sure there are examples like that for the JVM too.
I understand what you're saying, but I'm not making a mental mistake, and I'm not confused.
I'm working on something which takes the -mode out of org and builds something meaningfully similar which isn't wedded to emacs.
> But you shouldn't say org "lives in an editor"
Except it does. If you want to use the org format in any sort of full-fledged way, you're going to be doing it in Emacs.
Which, ok, it's a platform. But it's a platform which is a text editor, comparing it to the JVM only goes so far. The JVM is a bytecode interpreter, Emacs is an editor which has a bytecode interpreter. Yes, it's possible to run it headless, no, it isn't pleasant or fast, it's not designed for this, people don't, good luck embedding it in something else, and so on and so forth.
You seem to be taking the old joke "Emacs is a great operating system which just needs a good text editor" a bit too seriously here.
Org-mode is a bunch of things, and one of those things is a text format. That text format is too closely tied to emacs, it's simply hopeless to reimplement it in anything else. If you don't believe me, take a look at the spreadsheet functionality!
Which is a pity, because another one of the things Org is, is an intriguing and powerful approach to literate programming. One which I expect would be much more attractive if it didn't require one to use Emacs to employ it.
You're welcome to integrate headless emacs into your CI if you're so committed to thinking of it as a "platform much like the JVM". I've found it simpler to take as many ideas from org-mode as possible, and just build from scratch.
But I'm not ready to release my code yet, and until I am, I should spend more time writing it, and less time talking about it on the orange website.
I admire your efforts and passion on the subject. I myself would like the Org format more widely supported in other environments. (I personally do run Emacs headless in a couple of CI processes to get at its superior Org support, but it's hard to convince others of its greatness!)
> You seem to be taking the old joke "Emacs is a great operating system which just needs a good text editor" a bit too seriously here.
Not only do I take it too seriously -- it's not even a joke in my book. Let's agree to disagree on that bit and you can spend your time better than arguing about it!
FYI, there are a variety of Org parsing libraries outside of Emacs. Some of them even appear to be robust and well-developed. I collected a list here: https://alphapapa.github.io/org-almanac/#Parsing
> I'm heavily invested in doing something about all this, but since none of that code is public yet
Do you mean org or other areas of Emacs?
I slowly adopted org for a few personal notes, which turned into a blog of sorts over time (https://xenodium.com). Initially, I would just export and host the one-pager [1]. This was handy for viewing on mobile, but started slowing down on mobile Safari. I knew enough elisp to get me by, so I added my own mods to split the HTML export into multiple files. Then I needed some rss, so I glued on a handy package… buts that’s the thing, with some elisp glue you can bend the heck out of anything to make it do what you need. Can be quite satisfying.
My org usage continued on to babel… wouldn’t it be neat if I could get it to show SwiftUI layouts? Turns out, you can glue your way into that too [2].
Speaking of babel, I didn’t want to type the block boilerplate for them anymore, so yeah… a bit more elisp glue and got myself my own company completion [3].
I read Atomic Habits over lockdown and was keen to start tracking. Org mode supports habit tracking… but, it’s just not convenient enough to open up your laptop to track every habit. This time around, I couldn’t throw elisp at the problem, so I brought a little org over to my iPhone and built a native app https://flathabits.com, which syncs with Emacs over cloud.
I’m enjoying org on my iPhone, so I think I’ll bring a bit more task management over to it [4].
FYI for anyone looking for a good android org app, I've been using and enjoying Orgzly. [1] Looks like it has a totally different UX than flathabits - I'm not sure how xenodium is managing habits in org. Orgzly mostly is a notebook (org file) and headline/todo/deadline property organizing tool.
As a German person fully immersed in an English-speaking country (the US) for close to a decade now, I agree that "tunnel vision" is at least close enough in meaning.
> My first thought for the Scheuklappen-Effekt was blinders. Blinders are used to prevent horses from seeing sideways.
Yup, that's what Scheu-klappen means. "Shy-flaps", to use the English cognates: Flaps you put before (beside) the horse's eyes, to stop it shying away whenever it gets spooked by something it sees off to the side.
> Turns out, blinders are also called blinkers.
Funny how the adjectival form (gerund?) is apparently only used on the latter variant: I've only ever seen "that's a blinkered view", never "blindered".
Emacs is a truly remarkable program, which has painted itself into a corner. There are just too many locked-in architectural decisions to make a complete list, and it's good enough at being what it is to suck up all the oxygen needed to build another text editor which could overcome the 40+ year head start it has on anything else.
Org-mode is the perfect example of what's right and what's wrong with Emacs. It's great, and it's also a weird ad-hoc format, most of what it does shouldn't live in an editor, and if you want to really use it anywhere but inside emacs, good luck to you. Remarkably powerful for a TODO list which evolved sentience!
I'm heavily invested in doing something about all this, but since none of that code is public yet, I should probably stop faffing about on HN and knock off another issue before the weekend arrives...