Re: converting people to Emacs and org-mode

[John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 3:10 AM, 42 147 <aeuster@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 work at a large company with a fairly skewed age distribution (to
the upper end). Many just won't pick it up, but I definitely get some
head turns from others. I had a manager see me taking notes at a
meeting once and we went through the process of setting it up for him
on his computer. Windows idiosyncrasies do make the process harder for
really new users as it can be frustrating to both learn a completely
new program with finger-wrenching keystrokes *and* to constantly
troubleshoot the Windows-specific aspects of why that tutorial you
just tried to follow is not reproducible.

I've been meaning to make some tutorials trying to mimic real-life
use-cases that might justify picking up Org-mode. Some ideas:
- Walk through creation of a graph-heavy presentation in both PPT and
Org-mode/Beamer
   - Present the case where you get sent a couple additional data points
   - Show the tedious nature of updating the Excel data, updating all
plots, and copying/pasting into PPT
   - Show how if you update your csv you can simply re-export the Org
document and have them included

- Report writing
   - I have to write semi-annual reports on any projects
   - Word would require a lot of formatting stuff, assuming the data
you want is copy/pastable from other documents
   - *Everything* is in Org-mode for me (daily notes, reports, and
weekly team meeting presentations)
   - Show how I can easily copy/paste from Org docs into a report
while simply changing minimal text (mostly alignment and :width args)

- Notes/todo management (separate apps vs. having everything in one place)

- Just came up today: project management. I think showing MS Project
vs. Org + taskjuggler would be quite interesting for folks. If you're
already tracking todos in Org, making a project management tool out of
it is not that big of a step.

I think tutorials like this might help the process. In a lot of
instances, the initial interest gets hung up on "Wait, *what* is the
program?" as they try to wrestle with the mono-space font looking
program running. Making the sell, at least intuitively, might be a lot
easier if one could show Org compared to real-life common alternative
methods. The comfort folks have with their other methods is often
based on historical reasons and the sunk-cost fallacy.[1] There wasn't
a lot of reasoning that went into it -- it was simply taught as "the
way" and so that's what was adopted.

My company preaches Minitab as part of their Six Sigma/LEAN training.
I didn't want to leave Org, so I literally taught myself R so I
wouldn't have to be married to Minitab :)

Oh, and to your actual question (sorry for the digression), I'm a
Mechanical Engineer working in product development. I had one intro
level Java class in college and am certainly *not* a programmer. I
went on a quest for the perfect note-taking/todo manager at various
points in my working career (a short ~5 years at this point) and
learned Emacs specifically for Org-mode! I may be more geeky than
average compared to colleagues... but if you have a piece of software
that can get someone to learn Emacs just to use it... that's a win in
my book :)


John

P.S. I was using TiddlyWiki and the modified version, TeamTasks
(http://teamtasks.tiddlyspace.com) before and it took two attempts
before I finally stuck with Org.

[1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/