11 ms·

Org-Mode for Visual Studio Code

331 points by walkingolof 9y ago

hyperhopper 9y ago
As much as I like spacemacs/emacs, org mode truly is one of the best things about that editor, and its amazing to see it gaining some real momentum with those outside that ecosystem. This should do wonders for org mode, but more than that, give a lot of people scared off by emacs the chance to use the amazing org mode features.
- vvanders 9y ago
  org mode is literally the only reason I have spacemacs installed. If this is at the same quality bar I may move to VSCode completely. [edit] It's missing a lot of the keybindings that made org mode so fast to use so not 100% there yet. Still awesome project and hope it gets continued investment like VIM mode for VSCode.
  - walkingolof 9y ago
    dito, the problem with spacemacs is that it starts so slowly, VSCode is way faster to start.
    - xfer 9y ago
      The usual workflow for emacs is to launch it as a daemon and use emacsclient
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Oh, I usually have it running 24/7. The problem with spacemacs is it's an absolute bear to get running on win32. Takes me a good day+ to sort out the exact details every time I setup a new machine since it seems to change. Last time if I recall right I had to turn off https which was not confidence inducing.
      - saulrh 9y ago
        I've given up on running emacs on win. These days I run an X server, use bash-on-windows for SSH, and then forward X from a headless tower in a closet or a virtual machine to my desktop.
  - jkdufair 9y ago
    magit is also a good reason to have it installed outside of it's text editing capabilities.
  - arvinsim 9y ago
    Same thing here. I am looking for a lightweight editor because Spacemacs is heavy for me.
- oblio 9y ago
  > give a lot of people scared off by emacs I'm not even scared off, but I won't use Emacs because it doesn't have tabs. I know about the alternatives presented, but I just want tabs. I find it funny that the kitchen sink "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" Emacs doesn't have a built in tab implementation while the supposedly small Vim has one :)
  - turndown 9y ago
    I won't lie, when I first started using Spacemacs it kinda blew my mind there were no tabs; I don't really mind it now that I've installed unimpaired and can cycle through buffers with ]b and [b.
    - oblio 9y ago
      I'm mostly a Vim user and I could navigate the buffers with its buffer commands, yet I prefer tabs.
    - hiq 9y ago
      Do you see in advance how many times you will have to do ]b or [b? For me this is the advantage of tabs over buffers, and it's faster than checking the buffer every time it changes.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    I've found tabs to not scale as a UI idiom, generally. They're ok for up to about 10 documents, after that, I'm looking for something else. I normally use IntelliJ with two panes open, and about 120 tabs between the two of them. But because IntelliJ tabs can't scroll and Java filenames are long, the tab I want to switch to is never visible, and the tab list dropdown is painful to scan. C-n and C-S-n are what I end up using. And for the browser, I use tree-style tabs. The hierarchy keeps related tabs together, and I can collapse when I do a context switch. The fact I can see all the (top-level) tabs at once in a long list means spatial memory works better. In emacs, I use Helm and Projectile, bound to F11 and F12 for buffer and project searches. I've bound buffer switching to C-prior and C-next (those are PgUp and PgDown), and since the buffer order is basically a LIFO of whatever buffer you jumped to, the buffer you're looking for is usually within easy scrolling reach.
- weaksauce 9y ago
  Spacemacs with a properly setup evil bindings and a consistent bindings for all the packages and the Org mode, magit, helm, swoop modes/features are all just simply amazing and game changing.
roryisok 9y ago
Forgive my ignorance but what makes org mode better than markdown? Whenever I see it demonstrated it seems to be just another way of marking up content in plain text. Is there more to it?
- zimablue 9y ago
  I have never really used org-mode in anger but it's markdown in the context of an editor to which you have access to the primitives of in lisp with lots of attached features. For example a calendar and a simple spreadsheet.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  We always need another way to mark up plain text content. The current dozens or so of mostly incompatible solutions is clearly not enough for the world.
  - hyperpape 9y ago
    Org mode is slightly older than Markdown, and certainly older than Markdown's status as a default way to mark up text. More than that, it doesn't make sense to think that Markdown is the best solution, or at least the best solution for all use cases. People should continue to try and innovate, at least if they're aiming for something bigger than trivial improvements on the status quo.
- dangom 9y ago
  Org-mode's syntax isn't necessarily better than markdown's. The selling point of Org is that it is extremely extensible and synergizes well with the rest of the Emacs ecosystem. Tools like org-export, org-babel and the org-agenda - examples of the power of Org-mode - could in theory be implemented for markdown within any other editor. Until that happens, though, Org-mode continues to be better.
- Hemospectrum 9y ago
  Markdown is for writing human-readable text. Org-mode is for organizing many kinds of information (dates, tables, checklists...) in structured documents, while letting the user decide what that structure actually is. Both can be used for writing README files, but their feature sets are very different on the whole.
tambourine_man 9y ago
We need that on Vim
- bzg 9y ago
  There was https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/ https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/ but it's inactive since 2014. Maybe there is a more recent one that I'm not aware of.
- aleksei 9y ago
  You might try vim-orgmode, although it's not a complete clone: https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
- s4vi0r 9y ago
  Or just accept that emacs is objectively better software and switch to it? Evil mode is by far the most complete/true to vim vim emulation that exists, as far as I know.
  - tambourine_man 9y ago
    > Or just accept that emacs is objectively better software and switch to it? Oh, come on. I thought the editor wars died with Usenet many years ago.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      I think the fact that evil and spacemacs are en vogue right now changes the game a little bit. The debate doesn't seem to center around what editing method is best but which editor does 'Vim' best. There's a strong case that it's no longer Vim itself but projects like neovim or Emacs.
  - davidmr 9y ago
    It's easier said than done. I decided to switch about a month ago, and after playing around with evil mode for a week, I gave it up in favor of emacs-std bindings. The core editor evil emulation was flawless. All my 20-year muscle memory commands just worked without a second thought. When going into other packages like org, magit, etc. I noticed that all their default bindings were emacsey as well (for obvious reasons). I realized that I would be forever mapping evil bindings into new packages every time I wanted to use something new, so I gave it up as a bad job and just bit the bullet and switched to stock emacs without evil. I'm like halfway through the learning curve (I hope!) and it's tough. I've always had the caps lock key mapped to Ctrl anyway, but I still feel like my pinkie is about to fall off. After using vi/elvis/vim for almost 25 years, I do admit that I like emacs, but "just switch" still means a period of remarkably reduced productivity to many. (Yes, I know that for any popular package someone has published evil mode bindings and use-package makes them trivial, but it's not the point.)
yodon 9y ago
Are “checkboxes” like [ ] and [x] understood by the real org mode or would I need to define say [_] and [x] as TODO keywords if I wanted highlighting of that sort of syntax? (It’s been ~20 years since I was a heavy emacs user, looking forward to finally getting to play with Org Mode or at least an alpha of it)
- walkingolof 9y ago
  "Every item in a plain list can be made into a checkbox by starting it with the string ‘[ ]’. " https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Yes, they're understood, but in the different way. Org mode opted to treat headlines as TODO items (this choice is important for the purpose of e.g. generating agendas), whereas checkboxes apply to list items. As for the checkboxes, org mode understands [ ] and [X], and can process them relative to checkboxes in a sublist. For instance, if you write something like this: - [/] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz - [%] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz and then make org-mode reevaluate the list (by e.g. using a shortcut that toggles a checkbox state), it will automagically turn into: - [1/2] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz - [50%] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz (similar / and % feature is available for TODOs in headlines too). Org mode maintains such associations itself, recomputing them as you change state using org-mode commands, and it can also be configured to enforce additional structural constraints - e.g. preventing you from turning a TODO to DONE, if its subtasks are not all in DONE state.
bzg 9y ago
Very nice! Congrats for this. In GNU Emacs, Org is both a plain text format and a set of tools to edit .org files: it's nice to see both implemented outside Emacs!
tandav 9y ago
This is not org-mode if it can't do folding. Folding is main purpose of every outliner. Another fundamental thing is narrow to subtree (C-x n s/w in org-mode or just click in workflowy) So this is just .org syntax highliter with some snippets and shortcuts. .org markup language is much less common than markdown, and this is bad. Nobody wants to learn 2 similar languages with conflicting syntax.
- hyperpape 9y ago
  https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode/issues/85 https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode/issues/85 There's an issue, and the project is in alpha, but this doesn't sound good.
- GlennS 9y ago
  The thing is, org-mode is quite big. No new project will have implemented all of the features. For myself, I've never used narrow to subtree, but I was struck by the apparent lack of scheduling C-s, agenda view C-a a, tables (org-mode's tables are just fantastic) and source blocks. Maybe they'll get to some of these later. For now, just having a hierarchy of headings that you can move up-and-down and in-and-out easily seems pretty useful.
- reconbot 9y ago
  It can fold if you indent the text, not ideal but hardly a dealbreaker. I'm happy to say the VS Code is how I started with orgmode and I'm excited to see what's missing/coming, it's great!
- loudandskittish 9y ago
  I'm one of the many non-coders who uses Emacs just for Org-Mode and would love to be able to work in a more, well, "normal" editor. But you're right, without folding, or many other features (Refile being a major one), this just isn't there. Unfortunately, so much to Org-Mode that I'm not sure it can be cloned without an obscene amount of work.
m12k 9y ago
For anyone who thinks infinitely nested lists sounds like a good way to organize things, but would prefer an online, less editor-centric (but still keyboard friendly) tool, I recommend workflowy.com (or their more recent competitor dynalist.io who add more rich content support if that is your thing). I've been using Workflowy for years to organize my work, both for tasks and for mental maps and note-taking. I've found that it maps extremely well to the recursive nature of my mental map of an application and it subcomponents, tasks and subtasks, and so on. And overall I find that collapsible nested lists have all the benefits of a classic 'mind map' but without the constraints and 'easier to read than edit' nature of a bubble visualization.
- NickBusey 9y ago
  Just thought I'd mention my open source Workflowy clone, https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes It's definitely not done yet, but I've been using it as an effective replacement for Workflowy for almost a year now.
  - jsilence 9y ago
    org-mode support would be awesome!
    - NickBusey 9y ago
      I have definitely considered this, not exactly sure what it would entail as I never really got into org-mode, started using Workflowy and then BulletNotes instead. Do you mean just importing an org-mode file? Or an actual integration?
      - jsilence 9y ago
        I meant org-mode or a subset thereof as a supported working file format.
- walkingolof 9y ago
  For me the whole point of org-mode is that the stuff in it is to valuable to trust with a vendor that stores it in a proprietary format that cant be extracted in a meaningful way if the service/company folds.
dotdi 9y ago
Finally, a thing that I was using before it made it to the top of HN.
based2 9y ago
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7095-org4idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7095-org4idea
alvil 9y ago
I'm sorry for you
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
luord 9y ago
These all seem really useful. Specially the date thing, handy.

331 points by walkingolof 9y ago

As much as I like spacemacs/emacs, org mode truly is one of the best things about that editor, and its amazing to see it gaining some real momentum with those outside that ecosystem. This should do wonders for org mode, but more than that, give a lot of people scared off by emacs the chance to use the amazing org mode features.

vvanders 9y ago
org mode is literally the only reason I have spacemacs installed. If this is at the same quality bar I may move to VSCode completely. [edit] It's missing a lot of the keybindings that made org mode so fast to use so not 100% there yet. Still awesome project and hope it gets continued investment like VIM mode for VSCode.
- walkingolof 9y ago
  dito, the problem with spacemacs is that it starts so slowly, VSCode is way faster to start.
  - xfer 9y ago
    The usual workflow for emacs is to launch it as a daemon and use emacsclient
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Oh, I usually have it running 24/7. The problem with spacemacs is it's an absolute bear to get running on win32. Takes me a good day+ to sort out the exact details every time I setup a new machine since it seems to change. Last time if I recall right I had to turn off https which was not confidence inducing.
    - saulrh 9y ago
      I've given up on running emacs on win. These days I run an X server, use bash-on-windows for SSH, and then forward X from a headless tower in a closet or a virtual machine to my desktop.
- jkdufair 9y ago
  magit is also a good reason to have it installed outside of it's text editing capabilities.
- arvinsim 9y ago
  Same thing here. I am looking for a lightweight editor because Spacemacs is heavy for me.
oblio 9y ago
> give a lot of people scared off by emacs I'm not even scared off, but I won't use Emacs because it doesn't have tabs. I know about the alternatives presented, but I just want tabs. I find it funny that the kitchen sink "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" Emacs doesn't have a built in tab implementation while the supposedly small Vim has one :)
- turndown 9y ago
  I won't lie, when I first started using Spacemacs it kinda blew my mind there were no tabs; I don't really mind it now that I've installed unimpaired and can cycle through buffers with ]b and [b.
  - oblio 9y ago
    I'm mostly a Vim user and I could navigate the buffers with its buffer commands, yet I prefer tabs.
  - hiq 9y ago
    Do you see in advance how many times you will have to do ]b or [b? For me this is the advantage of tabs over buffers, and it's faster than checking the buffer every time it changes.
- barrkel 9y ago
  I've found tabs to not scale as a UI idiom, generally. They're ok for up to about 10 documents, after that, I'm looking for something else. I normally use IntelliJ with two panes open, and about 120 tabs between the two of them. But because IntelliJ tabs can't scroll and Java filenames are long, the tab I want to switch to is never visible, and the tab list dropdown is painful to scan. C-n and C-S-n are what I end up using. And for the browser, I use tree-style tabs. The hierarchy keeps related tabs together, and I can collapse when I do a context switch. The fact I can see all the (top-level) tabs at once in a long list means spatial memory works better. In emacs, I use Helm and Projectile, bound to F11 and F12 for buffer and project searches. I've bound buffer switching to C-prior and C-next (those are PgUp and PgDown), and since the buffer order is basically a LIFO of whatever buffer you jumped to, the buffer you're looking for is usually within easy scrolling reach.
weaksauce 9y ago
Spacemacs with a properly setup evil bindings and a consistent bindings for all the packages and the Org mode, magit, helm, swoop modes/features are all just simply amazing and game changing.

roryisok 9y ago

Forgive my ignorance but what makes org mode better than markdown? Whenever I see it demonstrated it seems to be just another way of marking up content in plain text. Is there more to it?

zimablue 9y ago
I have never really used org-mode in anger but it's markdown in the context of an editor to which you have access to the primitives of in lisp with lots of attached features. For example a calendar and a simple spreadsheet.
ryandrake 9y ago
We always need another way to mark up plain text content. The current dozens or so of mostly incompatible solutions is clearly not enough for the world.
- hyperpape 9y ago
  Org mode is slightly older than Markdown, and certainly older than Markdown's status as a default way to mark up text. More than that, it doesn't make sense to think that Markdown is the best solution, or at least the best solution for all use cases. People should continue to try and innovate, at least if they're aiming for something bigger than trivial improvements on the status quo.
dangom 9y ago
Org-mode's syntax isn't necessarily better than markdown's. The selling point of Org is that it is extremely extensible and synergizes well with the rest of the Emacs ecosystem. Tools like org-export, org-babel and the org-agenda - examples of the power of Org-mode - could in theory be implemented for markdown within any other editor. Until that happens, though, Org-mode continues to be better.
Hemospectrum 9y ago
Markdown is for writing human-readable text. Org-mode is for organizing many kinds of information (dates, tables, checklists...) in structured documents, while letting the user decide what that structure actually is. Both can be used for writing README files, but their feature sets are very different on the whole.

tambourine_man 9y ago

We need that on Vim

bzg 9y ago
There was https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/ https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/ but it's inactive since 2014. Maybe there is a more recent one that I'm not aware of.
aleksei 9y ago
You might try vim-orgmode, although it's not a complete clone: https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
s4vi0r 9y ago
Or just accept that emacs is objectively better software and switch to it? Evil mode is by far the most complete/true to vim vim emulation that exists, as far as I know.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  > Or just accept that emacs is objectively better software and switch to it? Oh, come on. I thought the editor wars died with Usenet many years ago.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I think the fact that evil and spacemacs are en vogue right now changes the game a little bit. The debate doesn't seem to center around what editing method is best but which editor does 'Vim' best. There's a strong case that it's no longer Vim itself but projects like neovim or Emacs.
- davidmr 9y ago
  It's easier said than done. I decided to switch about a month ago, and after playing around with evil mode for a week, I gave it up in favor of emacs-std bindings. The core editor evil emulation was flawless. All my 20-year muscle memory commands just worked without a second thought. When going into other packages like org, magit, etc. I noticed that all their default bindings were emacsey as well (for obvious reasons). I realized that I would be forever mapping evil bindings into new packages every time I wanted to use something new, so I gave it up as a bad job and just bit the bullet and switched to stock emacs without evil. I'm like halfway through the learning curve (I hope!) and it's tough. I've always had the caps lock key mapped to Ctrl anyway, but I still feel like my pinkie is about to fall off. After using vi/elvis/vim for almost 25 years, I do admit that I like emacs, but "just switch" still means a period of remarkably reduced productivity to many. (Yes, I know that for any popular package someone has published evil mode bindings and use-package makes them trivial, but it's not the point.)

yodon 9y ago

Are “checkboxes” like [ ] and [x] understood by the real org mode or would I need to define say [_] and [x] as TODO keywords if I wanted highlighting of that sort of syntax? (It’s been ~20 years since I was a heavy emacs user, looking forward to finally getting to play with Org Mode or at least an alpha of it)

walkingolof 9y ago
"Every item in a plain list can be made into a checkbox by starting it with the string ‘[ ]’. " https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Yes, they're understood, but in the different way. Org mode opted to treat headlines as TODO items (this choice is important for the purpose of e.g. generating agendas), whereas checkboxes apply to list items. As for the checkboxes, org mode understands [ ] and [X], and can process them relative to checkboxes in a sublist. For instance, if you write something like this: - [/] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz - [%] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz and then make org-mode reevaluate the list (by e.g. using a shortcut that toggles a checkbox state), it will automagically turn into: - [1/2] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz - [50%] Foo - [X] Bar - [ ] Baz (similar / and % feature is available for TODOs in headlines too). Org mode maintains such associations itself, recomputing them as you change state using org-mode commands, and it can also be configured to enforce additional structural constraints - e.g. preventing you from turning a TODO to DONE, if its subtasks are not all in DONE state.

bzg 9y ago

Very nice! Congrats for this. In GNU Emacs, Org is both a plain text format and a set of tools to edit .org files: it's nice to see both implemented outside Emacs!

tandav 9y ago

This is not org-mode if it can't do folding. Folding is main purpose of every outliner. Another fundamental thing is narrow to subtree (C-x n s/w in org-mode or just click in workflowy) So this is just .org syntax highliter with some snippets and shortcuts. .org markup language is much less common than markdown, and this is bad. Nobody wants to learn 2 similar languages with conflicting syntax.

hyperpape 9y ago
https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode/issues/85 https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode/issues/85 There's an issue, and the project is in alpha, but this doesn't sound good.
GlennS 9y ago
The thing is, org-mode is quite big. No new project will have implemented all of the features. For myself, I've never used narrow to subtree, but I was struck by the apparent lack of scheduling C-s, agenda view C-a a, tables (org-mode's tables are just fantastic) and source blocks. Maybe they'll get to some of these later. For now, just having a hierarchy of headings that you can move up-and-down and in-and-out easily seems pretty useful.
reconbot 9y ago
It can fold if you indent the text, not ideal but hardly a dealbreaker. I'm happy to say the VS Code is how I started with orgmode and I'm excited to see what's missing/coming, it's great!
loudandskittish 9y ago
I'm one of the many non-coders who uses Emacs just for Org-Mode and would love to be able to work in a more, well, "normal" editor. But you're right, without folding, or many other features (Refile being a major one), this just isn't there. Unfortunately, so much to Org-Mode that I'm not sure it can be cloned without an obscene amount of work.

m12k 9y ago

For anyone who thinks infinitely nested lists sounds like a good way to organize things, but would prefer an online, less editor-centric (but still keyboard friendly) tool, I recommend workflowy.com (or their more recent competitor dynalist.io who add more rich content support if that is your thing). I've been using Workflowy for years to organize my work, both for tasks and for mental maps and note-taking. I've found that it maps extremely well to the recursive nature of my mental map of an application and it subcomponents, tasks and subtasks, and so on. And overall I find that collapsible nested lists have all the benefits of a classic 'mind map' but without the constraints and 'easier to read than edit' nature of a bubble visualization.

NickBusey 9y ago
Just thought I'd mention my open source Workflowy clone, https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes It's definitely not done yet, but I've been using it as an effective replacement for Workflowy for almost a year now.
- jsilence 9y ago
  org-mode support would be awesome!
  - NickBusey 9y ago
    I have definitely considered this, not exactly sure what it would entail as I never really got into org-mode, started using Workflowy and then BulletNotes instead. Do you mean just importing an org-mode file? Or an actual integration?
    - jsilence 9y ago
      I meant org-mode or a subset thereof as a supported working file format.
walkingolof 9y ago
For me the whole point of org-mode is that the stuff in it is to valuable to trust with a vendor that stores it in a proprietary format that cant be extracted in a meaningful way if the service/company folds.

dotdi 9y ago

Finally, a thing that I was using before it made it to the top of HN.

based2 9y ago

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7095-org4idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7095-org4idea

alvil 9y ago

I'm sorry for you

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

luord 9y ago

These all seem really useful. Specially the date thing, handy.