I think you've done an excellent job at capturing my initial thoughts. It basically felt as if using Emacs was bound to be overkill as my (relatively simple) use case didn't seem to warrant its usage.

But, even if it is (possibly) overkill, I do prefer^[Granted, I haven't tried out Neovim for this yet.] how Emacs handles the folding. So, while there's the very real possibility that I'll not even utilize 1% of Emacs' potential, I feel most excited and (somehow) comfort while working with it 😅.

As for setting things up, I immediately started using Emacs through Spacemacs until the input lag became very noticeable on larger files. Then, I pivoted to Doom Emacs and I've been enjoying it so far. Perhaps I'll create my own config at some point in the future, But for now, Doom Emacs is all I need.

You can pretty easily export Org mode files to markdown (and LaTeX)!

Oh wow, thank you for offering me this learning experience!

There may be a setting you need to turn on (I forget and I’m not at my PC), but it works well and is very easy to use.

I'm on Doom Emacs, so perhaps this is enabled by default. But, at least for me, it was as easy as pressing SPC m e. This opens up the export menu. From there; one may select LaTeX, Markdown or any of the many other options to export to. The fuzzy search from M-x also allowed me to find it by typing out the functionality I was seeking.

Granted, I am not entirely content on how Emacs handled the export to Markdown. But I wouldn't bat an eye if Emacs enables me to configure it exactly as I'd want to.

Also, I haven’t really done it, but from what I understand you can also setup emacs to be a really good LaTeX editor.

Again, I wouldn't be surprised. It seems Emacs lends itself extremely well to whatever you throw at it 😂. No doubt; this is dndgame-material for sure*.

So do I, btw. 😜

Oh lol 😜 😂. Regardless, your input has been much appreciated! Thank you 😊!

Couldn't agree more.

Btw, I would like to take this chance to thank you and @winety@lemmy.zip for the civil, respectful, engaging and informative conversation you were having elsewhere!

Thanks for the recommendations! Helix doesn't seem to offer this functionality (yet). Unfortunately...

As for Zed, it does seem to be capable of reproducing the functionality found in the gif (or at least to some extent). However, installing it on my distro isn't pretty. Therefore, I wish to install it at some point, but I'll wait it out for now.

Thanks a lot for putting in the work! Uhmm..., how has testing been? Were you able to pull this off with Markdown?

I've also heard great things about it. Thanks for your endorsement! Unfortunately, correctly installing Zed on my distro might be more trouble than worth it at the moment. Hopefully the issue(s) will be resolved (very) soon. I would love to test it out and see it for myself.

By admission of my fellow Lemmy-users, I've gone and tried out many text editors over the course of the past few days. Unfortunately, I didn't like the installation options for Zed in my current distro of choice (i.e. Fedora):

• its flatpak is unverified
• not found in Fedora's own repos

It is found within Terra's repos. However, users report that -at least for Zed- some of the installed packages from Fedora's own repo are replaced by Terra's. This interaction can be prevented by giving preference for Fedora's own packages, but it seems like a can of worms I'm not very interested to engage with at the moment. Hopefully this situation will be resolved rather sooner than later.

Anyhow, have you got the chance to work with Emacs and/or Kate over the years? If so, could you chime in and give your thoughts on how Zed fares in comparison? Please note that I'm (mostly) asking within the confines of a relatively simple text editor used to take notes with.

Thank you so much! The instructions will be very helpful whenever I test out Zed later today or early tomorrow.

Fam, I believe your post is all over the place. Please consider to clarify the following:

• What is it that you actually desire?
  • Easy installation through a script? Or perhaps through a Kickstart file? Or any of the dozens of other tools used to deploy a fleet of systems?
  • Declarative system management? While perhaps not as powerful as NixOS, the industry has been working with tools like Ansible for over a decade.

Basically it feels insane that it's the way most linux users and servers in the world operate.

Frankly, I somewhat agree. But I believe most people operate within paradigms like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." and/or "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.". Isn't "the path of least resistance" what we default to anyways? And if we additionally weigh in sunk cost fallacy, it is no surprise that people are more often than not wed to their ways... Or, at least act upon it.

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don't more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

I believe NixOS suffers from the following:

• For the longest time, it really was just niche. Like, NixOS has only fairly recently started to garner a decent audience. Boiling Steam's chart, while it shouldn't be used to gauge the user base of each distro, it does help us in finding trendings within a distro. And for NixOS, it clearly shows how it has slowly but surely grown a significant presence from 2020 onwards. Contrast that to Debian or Fedora that have always had a significant presence (or, at least for over a decade).
• The onboarding experience is absolute horrid. To flake or not? To lix or nixcpp? And I haven't even mentioned how its documentation is just dog water. Or how over the last year its organization has shown clear growing pains.

Anyhow, I'm glad to hear you jumped ship to NixOS! Wish me luck when I enter its hostile waters (with the intent to conquer it) this summer 😉!

Thanks for another endorsement of Kate!

By the recommendation of others, I've actually installed and tried out Kate in the mean time.

So far, so good. 🙂