On 8/4/20 11:48 AM, Maxim Nikulin
wrote:
As to
installation, I believe that org-mode bundled with Emacs is more
than enough for first try. It is a shorter path to become familiar
with most prominent features just to start editing of an .org file
(or to download a prepared demo .org). Getting the latest stable
version
could be a next step for the hooked users.
I might disagree, slightly, mostly with
the last sentence. This is one of the very few issues I feel
semi-competent to comment on. It would be impolite to actually
say what I thought the only meaning of 'lisp' was before Emacs,
which I had tasted and spit-out a dozen times before really
reading in depth about org-mode. I have expanded my Emacs
horizons to include org-journal, emacs-w3m, org-roam, ERC, and
writeroom modes, but I don't code.
This is relevant because I had always
been satisfied with the built-in org-mode. A couple of weeks ago,
when I decided to give org-roam a try, my best guess is org-roam
pulled in 9.3.6. That is my best guess because suddenly it was
there, and that is the only recent package I had installed.
That may not be the case, but regardless,
I learned I had 9.3.6, which I never explicitly installed, when I
ran into some errors. I can no longer competently describe
exactly what I was doing, but I am pretty sure it related to
calling org-journal. I know whatever I was doing caused an error
message: "Invalid function: org-preserve-local-variables."
I spent some quite frustrating hours
searching, and this error was frequently mentioned with
org-refile, and I think helm and babel. I was on the verge of
mailing the list, but I wanted to say I had tried the best advice
I found [1], and I did so by backing up my entire emacs.d and then
deleting all .elc files. This worked. I've no understanding of the
underlying technicalities, and I'm pretty sure I had never heard
of byte-compiled files (except in the most general sense unrelated
to Emacs). It was literally like magic ( maybe magit :-) ) to me
when Emacs repopulated all my .elc files!
I would, therefore, encourage any new
users coming to org-mode and/or Emacs to start with the highest,
most stable version of both that is available to them with their
level of competence (for me that is always what is in my distro's
package manager) and with the further explaination that they might
run into issues down the road if they don't.
It is true that "[g]etting the latest
stable version could be a next step for the hooked users", but I
have used org-mode for five years without doing so, and many
people may be so excited (like I was) that they finally found the
One True Note-taking Tool (tm) that they immediately start blindly
build an entire system only to crash into a byte-compiled wall.
Their very first TODO should be "upgrade org-mode soon," [2] like
"Call Mom" is in the todo.txt examples.
[2] The idea that someone would use
org-mode and not get "hooked" is paradoxically unimaginable.
--
Bo Grimes