rmarkdown VS magit

I'm surprised to see no one has pointed out [RMarkdown + RStudio](https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com) as one way to immediately interface with Pandoc.

I used to write papers and slides in LaTeX (using vim, because who needs render previews), then eventually switched to Pandoc (also vim). I eventually discovered RMarkdown+RStudio. I was looking for a nice way to format a simple table and discovered that rmarkdown had nice extensions of basic markdown (this was many years ago so maybe that is incorporated into vanilla markdown/pandoc).

The RMarkdown page claims:

> R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more.

...which I think is largely due to using pandoc as the core generator.

RStudio shows you the pandoc command it runs to generate your document, which I've used to figure out the pandoc command I want to run when I've switched to using pandoc directly.

This is a bit of a "lazy" way to interact with pandoc. Maybe the "laziest" aspect: when I get a new computer, I can install the entire stack by installing Rstudio, then opening a new rmarkdown document. Rstudio asks whether I'd like to install all the necessary libraries -- click "yes" and that's it. Maybe that sounds silly but it used to be a lot of work to manage your LaTeX install. These days I greatly favor things that save me time, which seems to get more precious every year.

Then, I worked on a Shiny project where I had to learn R Markdown. I was very excited about it because being paid to learn a new technology is something I have always preferred. I also worked with Highcharts graphs, which I didn’t do for years. It was also the first time I was being paid to design something. I didn’t enjoy that part as much as development, but I cannot say it was a bother either.

files/figure-latex/unnamed-chunk-2-1.pdf) Try to find the following text in midterm-question.Rmd: . See https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/385 for more info.

We used R Markdown for cleaning and analysis, creating updateable web pages we could share with everyone involved. Similarweb’s categories were useful, but too niche for us. So we spent a lot of time recategorizing and redefining the groupings. We used the token count for each website — how many words or phrases — to measure it’s importance in the overall training data.

In [R Markdown](https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/) or [Quarto](https://quarto.org/), I can include inline code in a math equation, e.g.,

you probably want an rmd file with html output

GitHub issue code folding

R Markdown / Quarto https://quarto.org/ https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ ; can dynamically generate a document and compile it to HTML, PDF, others

Hi! At this moment I'm not opening the source code, but I can explain you the tech used. This site is based on another site I created before named https://r-charts.com/ and it was created with blogdown (HUGO + R Markdown). Hence, each tutorials is an R markdown file. For PYTHON CHARTS, in order to run Python within an R markdown file I had to use an R package named reticulate. In addition, the template depends on shuffle.js for filtering and fuse.js for searching

Then the slowness that you're seeing is probably Windows-specific, and that's why everyone else is telling you that Magit is actually fast.

WSL might make things faster.[1] IIUC, the problem is that starting new processes is much slower on Windows than on Linux/Unix and Magit relies heavily on that. This seems to have plagued Git tooling more generally but maybe this got fixed since then.[2]

[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/58444

[2] https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/2395#issuecomment-1710...

You'll want to invest the time in learning Magit, which will change your life once you get the hang of it (and I was a heavy user of Fugitive in Vim previously!), and it's unlikely you'll find a better integration with GDB anywhere else on the planet than with Emacs, though I can't say that empirically. You just need to take the plunge and start learning it, then cut over and take the hit in productivity one day when you're feeling adventurous. You'll ultimately become far more powerful than you've ever been. Especially if you delve into elisp over time. I use Spacemacs, which is bloated and has bugs, but it has so many features that I haven't undertaken the massive endeavor to replace it from scratch yet.

> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

This can be done most comfortably with org-mode in emacs. It offers a lot of features, and they all operate on plain text. There are also nice integrations for git and languagetool, but I guess those are less exclusive.

How does this differ from https://magit.vc/ ?

I would rather see innovative tools that lessen our dependency on 50+ year old tech. This is still a glorified teletype. It uses AI to autosuggest git commands? Contrast with Magit[1], which (while it has a tiny bit of a learning curve, but also nowhere near 23M in funding) actually makes interacting with git a pleasure.

[1]: https://magit.vc

Also was using Emacs (org-mode)[https://orgmode.org] for years with (Magit)[https://magit.vc] package for git. I feel org-mod is a precursor to Roam Research, Obsidian, et al. Hit the spot for years but I wanted editing on mobile so that’s why I’m here. :)