Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Org's biggest strength 
  > is that the various features are tightly integrated.

You may see that as an advantage, but I consider it a drawback.  The
"tight integration" of these different features is an obstacle to
learning to use one of them, or even finding out about one of them.

*We need to make them separate.*

Separate and integrated are not opposites.
It is possible for several features to be integrated,
in the sense that they work together _when you want that_,
and also separate, in the sense that we describe each one separately
and you can learn about one without paying the slightest attention
to the others.

                                                         That doesn't 
  > mean you couldn't use Org for just one of its features, you 
  > definitely could, but the beauty of the system is that the 
  > different features aren't strictly separated.

I would say that is the complexity and obscurity of the system.

I think we can make them clearly separate, for purposes
of documenting them, without reducing the ability to integrate them
for users who use more than one.

  > =paper.org=. So far, so uninteresting. But with Org you can put 
  > TODO notes in =paper.org=, add deadlines, date and time stamps, 
  > etc., anything Org supports. Then, when you display your agenda 
  > (i.e., run a function that takes the contents of, in this example, 
  > =agenda.org=, and creates a nice overview of it in an agenda-like 
  > fashion), you can have the TODO items, deadlines etc. from 

I can see that that integration is useful -- but _the fact that it
applies only to "parts of Org mode"_ makes it also a a limitation.
It is a drawback that _only_ the modes that are "part of Org mode" can
integrate with these features -- and the rest of Emacs cannot do so.

Instead of dividing Emacs facilities and modes into the "Org
first-class modes" and the "Org second-class modes", we should make
all modes equally able to integrate in these ways.

  > > It would make more sense to call them various different modes. 
  > > That
  > > they all use a certain way of formatting the text may not be 
  > > important
  > > to mention.

  > Actually, it's crucial to mention that.

People who want to use a specific one of these facilities don't need
to know that.  It is useful for those users who want to use more
than one of these facilities together -- but that should be
an advanced topic.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)