Re: [emacs-humanities] Thematic analysis in Emacs

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Oct 20, 2024, at 13:53, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2024 20:53:21 +0000
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary via Emacs-humanities <emacs-humanities@gnu.org>
>> 
>> I’m (at last) entering a PhD course this month and have started working on 
>> data from my MA.
>> 
>> I have about 30 hours of interviews (14 people, in Japanese) and I’m 
>> wondering what’s the best way to do thematic analysis in Emacs.
>> 
>> I’ve first started with a spreadsheet in LibreOffice and stopped when I saw 
>> how cumbersome the thing was going to become.
>> I then moved to tables in Emacs and the difficulty of having word-wrapping 
>> in cells stopped me after 5 minutes of searching on the web.
>> 
>> I’m left with using an org file, with titles, tags, etc. But I’m wondering 
>> if it’s the best approach.
> 
> Please describe the problems you had with table.el.  AFAICT,
> table-fixed-width-mode lets you have fixed-width columns with text
> wrapping, so I'm not sure I understand the difficulties.

I created a table in org mode.
I started to copy-paste contents from my LO file.
I realised that the contents were not wrapped (even though my general text 
contents parameters indicate that I want wrapping).
I checked the web to find a solution.
The best answer on Stack Exchange was way too complex for something that was 
just a checkbox away in LO.
I moved on.

Also, I found that I needed to call a function to be able to edit a cell, which 
was way too cumbersome. There are probably cases where that is practical or 
useful, but being kept from directly editing text in a text editor is not my 
idea of a good UX.

As you reminded us the other day about dictionary.el on devel, we should not 
expect all the information about various parameters and functions to be found 
in the manual. For that reason I stopped considering the manual as my first 
source of information.

-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary
@jchelary@emacs.ch
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/