Re: [O] converting people to Emacs and org-mode

[Gunnar Wolf]

42 147 dijo [Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 04:10:07AM -0400]:
> 
> Hello mailing list,
> 
> This might be considered off-topic.
> 
> The question is the title: have you been able to convert many people to
> Emacs / org-mode? Are converts all programmers, or those versed in
> programming? -- Or have you converted non-programmers, e.g., anyone who
> edits text for a living?
> (...)

I won't talk about the people I have (not yet) converted, but about
the person who converted me: I am a long-time Emacs user (got
initiated back in 1983, being 6 or 7 years old, at the university
where my father worked, works, and where I now work as well). We spent
many Friday nights at the terminal room, he was working on some
proceedings book compilation and I was getting exposed to computers
when few had chance. So, yes, I got started on TeX and Emacs at quite
an early age. And they deformed my mind forever, it seems.

One of the factors that led me to switch to a Linux environment in the
mid-90s was that both tools I cherished (but hadn't touched in almost
ten years) were readily available. And while I did nothing with TeX
for many years (using LyX for the occasional writeup), Emacs became
very early part of my sysadmin tools, and later, my programming buddy.

Still more years passed. Between 2009 and 2011, I edited a book for
the university — «Construcción colaborativa del conocimiento»,
studying the free software / free culture movements. The process was
most interesting, but quite painful - We did the inter-author
collaboration using a Web framework, and it was up to me to convert
the final version to LaTeX and typeset it adequately. In the end, we
got quite a good result¹, which you can download if you find
interesting (written in Spanish).

Talking about the woes in the conversion, an anthropologist (and a
very good friend of mine) suggested me to take a look at org-mode. I
had previously just heard about it and dismissed it because I can
perfectly do without yet-another-todo-list-manager (which is what I
thought Org was). But after he showed me the ease with which he writes
his articles and was halfway through his doctoral thesis, intermixing
LaTeX bits, exporting to PDF and HTML, easily producing the Beamer
slides I took so much pride in having mastered... I got converted
right away.

That was just six months ago. I now write all of my articles and
presentations in Org, and am halfway through (yet another) book.

¹ http://seminario.edusol.info/