"What makes this pattern so elegant to me is the familiarity of its experience. I don't know about you, but I've been annotating books and taking notes with pencils and pens for almost my entire life, and this is often the most engaging and soul-lifting experience. There is a je ne sais quoi in this interaction that makes me feel closer to, if not part of, the thing I'm reading. This is a physical annotate-in-place, and it works beautifully.

I've been long searching for a cognitive bridge between the ergonomics of putting pen to source text with the infinite flexibility of a software solution. annotate-in-place is the pattern that provides that bridge, and org-remark in Emacs is one implementation of that pattern. With it, digital note taking feels as intuitive and ergonomic to me as note taking on a physical medium."