4 ms·

I kind of agree. But I just use plain text files with bullets. I haven't seen a compelling argument to justify learning all the concepts and keystrokes of org

by norswap 11y ago

I kind of agree. But I just use plain text files with bullets. I haven't seen a compelling argument to justify learning all the concepts and keystrokes of org-mode. I don't need all the bell and whistles. Export to HTML? Why?

Jtsummers 11y ago
If you're already an emacs user (is it supported in other editors?) you can start here and grow as you need it. At least, that's how I've done it. Started with bulleted lists (folding was convenient and really all I made use of). Then expanded to linking within a document and to other documents. My .emacs file auto-loads an index.org file for me, this has links to numerous other documents. Some are little more than scratchpads, one is a list of PDFs. Some of those have become links to org files that link to the pdf and I have notes/annotations in the org file. It's my own wiki. Export to HTML was useful a couple times, but not something I've used much of. I generated some code samples and used org-babel mode. The HTML view was nice enough to share out to other people. I'm still barely using any of its features. The compelling thing for me is that when I've wanted a new feature, it was already there 9 times out of 10.
hsitz 11y ago
If all you're doing now is plain text with bullets there may be nothing to gain. If, however, you have main bullet items that then have subitems, you'd gain the advantage of "collapsing" items (what in some coding environments is called "folding"). To get this benefit all you'd need to do is open a blank text file with '.org' suffix, then instead of bullets use an asterisk. Put one asterisk in front of main bullets, two asterisks in front of subitems. Then use <tab> key to expand or collapse subitems of current bullet item. Or <shift-tab> to expand or collapse subitems throughout the document. That's all you need to get started using org-mode productively.

by norswap 11y ago

Jtsummers 11y ago

If you're already an emacs user (is it supported in other editors?) you can start here and grow as you need it. At least, that's how I've done it. Started with bulleted lists (folding was convenient and really all I made use of). Then expanded to linking within a document and to other documents. My .emacs file auto-loads an index.org file for me, this has links to numerous other documents. Some are little more than scratchpads, one is a list of PDFs. Some of those have become links to org files that link to the pdf and I have notes/annotations in the org file. It's my own wiki. Export to HTML was useful a couple times, but not something I've used much of. I generated some code samples and used org-babel mode. The HTML view was nice enough to share out to other people. I'm still barely using any of its features. The compelling thing for me is that when I've wanted a new feature, it was already there 9 times out of 10.

hsitz 11y ago

If all you're doing now is plain text with bullets there may be nothing to gain. If, however, you have main bullet items that then have subitems, you'd gain the advantage of "collapsing" items (what in some coding environments is called "folding"). To get this benefit all you'd need to do is open a blank text file with '.org' suffix, then instead of bullets use an asterisk. Put one asterisk in front of main bullets, two asterisks in front of subitems. Then use <tab> key to expand or collapse subitems of current bullet item. Or <shift-tab> to expand or collapse subitems throughout the document. That's all you need to get started using org-mode productively.