Somewhat related: I was amazed how easy it is to make a good looking pdf with code snippets from LaTeX in Org-mode. It makes it look like you've spent a lot of time on it..
While impressive, these only scratch the surface of what org-mode can do. For example, they lack the spreadsheet, the time tracker, the agenda, and the export framework. Still, even just supporting the basic syntax is useful.
Definitely check out spacemacs [0] for some really great org-mode defaults after adding the org-mode layer [1]. This has been my go to editor on windows/linux/osx for quite a few months now and its great.
In general how do you feel about spacemacs in the long term? I've been looking to learn emacs and spacemacs looks like a great starting point, but after awhile would you look to creating an emacs config specifically for you, or does spacemacs leave enough freedom to do what you want after you've gotten used to everything?
Spacemacs uses a "layers" feature which sort of groups together different packages from all over the emacs ecosystem into somewhat cohesive all-inclusive-packages. Things like layers for specific languages which would include syntax hilighting, code completion, snippets, etc...
Generally, this makes things super convenient for you. It takes a fraction of the effort and research to get a new language or feature going.
It also means that if you need something different from the defaults, it's another thing to learn how to modify a layer to suit your needs (not as simple as I had hoped). Also, if the package you want isn't available as a layer, you have to create your own custom layer for it. This gets you trying to think about organizing your packages, which while maybe useful, can be a big time sink too.
Using it for about 3 months now, it's quickly become my go-to editor. I'm very happy with the defaults provided by spacemacs layers, and haven't yet felt the need to modify them much. I did look into it once and got scared away. All the customizations I've made are in regard to Emacs defaults themselves, and fit nicely into my .spacemacs file.
Learning emacs and vim from decades old documentation is quite a journey. Keep an eye out for Stackoverflow answers. They tend to be the most up to date and relevant.
> Learning emacs and vim from decades old documentation is quite a journey.
Can't speak for Vim, but the Emacs documentation has hardly succumbed to the sort of obsolescence your description of it implies. (It's also built in to the editor, and reachable via M-x info.) You might want to take a look at it, before you go on consigning novices unfortunate enough to heed your bad advice to the hell that is Stack Overflow. (And if you're going to point people in even that general direction, at least point them at Emacs SE, which unlike SO isn't overrun with garbage and lies.)
I agree, for emacs, I find the official documentation nicer to use, because it's about the version I'm actually using, while a lot of the web stuff is years out of date, whether it's in blog posts, StackOverflow, or EmacsWiki. This matters for some things more than others of course, since some stuff hasn't changed in years, and other things have been overhauled more recently (like packages).
Vim documentation is solid too: it's included in the editor (like Emaces), and you can look things up with `:help` org `:helpgrep`. There are both tutorials, end-user-oriented pages and comprehensive references. IMO, Emacs is still slightly ahead with its C-h a/f/c` commands, but both projects boast quite good documentation.
Emacs documentation is good for exploring modes, but I found StackOverflow way better when I have no idea what the name of the feature I'm looking for even is.
I used emacs for decades, but always yearned vi keys/modes (VIPER was alright, but vim has more appeals). I tried spacemacs for a couple of months last year and realized it was just painful to set it up the way I liked it. I also didn't use most of its "features", and I didn't like helm at all. Spacemacs was just not for me. I ended up return to plain emacs and installed evil and its relatives, and that was a lot easier to get it up and running.
I guess if you have no background on elisp or emacs, it might be not that hard to pick up spacemacs. Once you want to customize it nontrivially, you always need to read up the document. For spacemacs, that means you have to read not only emacs and elisp info but also spacemacs documents. It may not be difficult though, but I found that hunting through multiple configuration files to do a trivial change and going through all the things need to be done to add a package was just too much.
I believe a simple dot file can go a long way than a multi-direcotry structure that evolves out of your control (occasional breakage in configurations brought by that). The official emacs update is much more conservative and reasonable, and never broke my configurations. Now I guess it is just me. Because the dot file is mine! My precious!
I feel the same way; Spacemacs is neat and all, but its core philosophy just rubs me the wrong way. I want my installation of Emacs to have the packages needed to fulfil my own personal needs, no more. I also want to know that if I do nothing to my Emacs configuration, in 10 years my experience will be exactly as it is today.
Spacemacs takes the opposite approach and supplies you with more gadgets than you need and the "crowd-configured" aspect of the project means that what you have today and what you have six months from now could be very different. It might be a product of my age (I'm not that old, 32), but I've noticed that I've become more reticent to change in the past few years, especially when it's change that modifies daily habits of mine.
With that said, I think that Spacemacs does have good things going for it that I'd like to see trinkle into Emacs eventually. For example, the idea of having keybindings "namespaced" (e.g. 'f' for file manipulations, 'p' for project, etc.) is a great approach to make sense of the dizzying number of commands available in Emacs, and it'd certainly be cool if something like that was introduced into Emacs (in addition to the existing bindings).
It leaves a lot of freedom. I have even redefined some spacemacs internal functions to suit my needs (but I don't recommend doing that, spacemacs is heavily developed and they shuffle/refactor things all the time).
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-L...