searene

You are right, I don't have any baseline. I just try it and see if it works. One good thing about the software field is that I can compile and run the code for verification. It may not be optimal, but at least it's testable.

Me too. I’ve been playing with various coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot for some time, and I would say that their most useful feature is educating me. For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before, or help me debug a production issue. Then I would choose to write the code by myself after I’ve figured everything out with their help. Writing code by myself is definitely faster in most cases.

Yes, I agree with you. But unfortunately working is the best cooperation pattern we've found so far, the society keeps running smoothly if everyone is working. Maybe AI will change it, maybe not, let's wait and see.

Me too, that seems to be a bug.

I think the biggest advantage of Org Mode over Markdown is that Org Mode can attach properties to headers. This seems trivial, but it's not. Because of that, you can:

1. Give a header an id and jump to it from anywhere.

2. Attach scheduling information to the header so that you can easily track TODOs and DONEs. I usually further break down a TODO into several sub-TODOs and write something under each one to organize my thoughts, including code blocks, tables, quotes, footnotes, which is impossible in Markdown.

3. You can attach anything else to it, too. I also attach an Anki note ID to it and use Org Mode as an alternative Anki editing environment. Because of the attached note ID, I can easily distinguish whether I want to create a new Anki card (without an ID) or update an existing one (with an ID). That is also hard to implement in Markdown (Strictly speaking, I don't think it's even possible to implement it in Markdown).

My only complaint is that Emacs is the only text editor that fully supports Org Mode. Other editors (e.g. vim, VSCode) support it too, with only to an extent.

Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

Thanks. Actually I've tried both the built-in pixel-scroll-mode and good-scroll. None of them gives me the experience of a modern text-editor (e.g. VSCode).

My experience with Emacs is bittersweet. On the one hand, org-mode in Emacs is extremely powerful. I use it to schedule TODO items, organize my thoughts, write notes, publish websites, and lots of other things. On the other hand, Emacs drives me crazy from time to time. It's slow, hard to maintain, the environment I set up is fragile, and most of all, it lacks a modern UI. Scrolling pixel by pixel is still impossible in Emacs.

Sometimes I do use VSCode as an alternative, but VSCode only has a rudimentary implementation of org-mode, and the so-called org-mode alternative - markdown - is not nearly as powerful as org-mode.

I feel the same. VSCode is better than Emacs in lots of aspects, but I cannot leave Emacs for now because Org Mode in Emacs is just too powerful. Although VSCode also has an Org Mode addon, it only has some basic functionalities and hasn't been updated for ages. Lots of people begin to create new products based on Markdown (e.g. foam, VSCode anki editor, etc.). But in my opinion, Markdown is not as great as Org Mode. For example, Org Mode can set properties for each heading, which is quite useful in some situations. I hope we can have more powerful Org Mode-related addons in VSCode.

Thanks for the feedback!

I’m not a native English speaker, either. The biggest challenge for me is to write English sentences without grammatical errors. To do that, you need feedbacks that tell you whether your sentences are correct, that’s especially hard when you neither live in an English-speaking country nor have an English-speaking friend. Online language learning forums help a little bit, but they are not enough if you want constant feedbacks.

I use VSCode most of the time, but when taking notes, org-mode is always my first choice. It's just too powerfull, nothing can replace it.

Me too, algorithms are extremely hard for me at first. It took me a really long time to solve easy problems, and I could only solve 1~2 middle-level problems in one day. But finally, I managed to handle them by getting to know some effective learning strategies, e.g.

1. Explain to yourself how algorithms work, like a teacher teaching his/her students. 2. It's even impossible to explain to yourself when facing some middle-level/hard problems. Then I got another good idea: write everything down on papers. Finally, I found out that it was not that hard to solve these problems.

There are a lot of other learning strategies. In retrospect, I think it's lucky to be an engineer. Although it's hard, tough, brain-racking, I get to know a lot of learning strategies along the road. Sometimes you wonder if others are way smarter than you, but maybe they just know some learning strategies that you don't know, and they never give up.