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Comment on Ask HN: Why would you prefer Emacs over IntelliJ IDEA?

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- Works in the terminal

- org mode

- has a lot of maturity and innumerable useful extensins/plugins/whatever-we-may-choose-to-call-them

- can be quite lightweight if desired

Do you think that org-mode could be extracted into its own application, or is it too bound to emacs? As a die-hard vim-user-turned-intellij-user (mostly because intellij has the best vim keybindings I've seen), org-mode is the thing about emacs that fascinates me the most.

The problem with extracting org-mode into its own application is that a lot of the magic of org-mode comes from emacs. It's not so much being tied up in emacs as sharing and extending the design. By moving org-mode elsewhere, you'd reinvent the wheel and put an artificial division where there doesn't need to be one.

For example, org-babel allows you easy access to any language you have support for in emacs. Same syntax highlighting, same behaviour, same utilities. Improve any of that and org-mode takes advantage of it for basically zero cost.

I bet evil's vim keybindings are better, at least they are the best I've seen.

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