7 ms·

How to take smart notes with Org mode

296 points by noelwelsh 7y ago

ssivark 7y ago
Jethro Kuan’s earlier posts on Org mode for planning finally made the idea click for me (maybe just the last straw on the camel’s back). I strongly recommend checking those out too. Btw, to Notion users — does anyone feel that it’s matched/surpassed Org mode in the breadth of workflows it supports?
- rushsteve1 7y ago
  I've actually been flip-flopping between Notion and Org-mode for months, and just the other day decided to finally organize myself all on Notion. I love Org-mode, and will likely continue to use it for various things, but I agree that Notion is the only thing that (to me) surpasses it.
  - immigrantsheep 7y ago
    My two biggest problem with notion are no offline storage of data and monthly payments.
    - Scarbutt 7y ago
      Yeah, notion looks great but for this particular case, the part the about being tied to a montnly fee to be able to write my personal notes didn't felt right. Also the friction to write notes felt higher, unless you leave your browser always opened and logged in.
    - bachmeier 7y ago
      It's now free if you have an academic email. Obviously that doesn't apply to most people, but it was enough to get me to at least create an account.
  - bollockitis 7y ago
    I also moved from org to Notion and have mixed feelings about it. Notion is an amazing platform. In some ways, it’s revolutionary, but everything I store in Notion feels... haphazard. It’s easy to get lost in. Org feels more structured, less Notion is so flexible that it can be almost anything but I still don’t have the ability to extend it like I can with org. It’s also slow and, as is common with Electron apps, a resource hog that I frequently need to restart to keep its appetite under control. There is considerable lag when doing simple things and the keystroke latency is brutal. I don’t mind paying for it though. I prefer it, actually. I think I’m going to stick with it anyway. It’s so good in so many ways and I hope it will only improve with time.
  - mariomeissner 7y ago
    For those of you using Notion, what system do you follow to organize your notes? Is anyone here actively using something similar to Zettelkasten inside Notion?
    - wortelefant 7y ago
      my Notion/Zettelkasten practice is inspired by this thread: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-on https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-on I still don't completely trust the manual ordering of the entries to be persistent, but for notetaking/archiving it has worked well so far. I recently started to write longer notes on one topic, sometimes including passages from several articles, instead of adhering to the size limitations of a paper card
- animalnewbie 7y ago
  What is notion?
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    They have good SEO
    - verletx64 7y ago
      They have good platform too.
  - verletx64 7y ago
    I would say it's primarily a web application for note taking (there's some auxiliary capabilities around kanban boards, etc, but most people I know who use it, use it as a rich text editor). I think where Notion differs from others, and where it has similarity to Org-Mode is it's ability to create 'blocks' with more dynamic behaviours (calendars, kanban blocks, tables) as well as how easy it is to create linkages between pages.
  - johntash 7y ago
    It's SaaS only, so no locally stored data. https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so
- jlevers 7y ago
  I have two issues with Notion -- first, it's not _quite_ fast enough. I find myself avoiding taking notes with Notion because I don't feel like waiting for the page to load, the search to find what I'm looking for, and so on. And second, as someone else mentioned, it feels kind of structurally disorganized.
shakezula 7y ago
> Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. – Richard Feynman I haven’t ever found a quote that described how i approach software as succinctly as this. I use a bullet journal religiously and it’s specifically because of this. Great article.
- juandazapata 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, is your bullet journal digital?
  - shakezula 7y ago
    No, it's physical. That's on purpose, because it requires me to sit down at the beginning of my day and pull it out. The writing and routine of it is very therapeutic. I normally do it over my morning coffee and reddit/hn browsing.
- jph00 7y ago
  I can't seem to find a reliable source for this quote though. Anyone know of one?
  - karlicoss 7y ago
    Closest I know is this [0] interview > Weiner: > Well, the work was done in your head but the record of it is still here. > Feynman: > No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. OK? [0] https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5020-5#annotations:VJkQwDSeEeqSYq_Uw7vQRA https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.aip.org/history-programs...
    - loevborg 7y ago
      Thanks so much for digging this up! So the version in the article is a pseudo-quote?
- chrisweekly 7y ago
zelly 7y ago
I used to use Evernote then org-mode heavily but switched to pen and paper notes and haven't looked back. Whenever I used org-mode I started tweaking Emacs and writing macros for hours.
- MarcScott 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm a big emacs and org mode fan, but use pen and paper now for note taking. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my note pad sits at my desk as a constant reminder of what needs to be done. Org files sit in my file system and are often forgotten.
  - LeoTinnitus 7y ago
    I take notes in class or in a meeting with pen and paper mainly because tablets still suck at this and typing on a phone isn't much better. The downside to this is organizing them after the fact. Especially if you don't have a lot of free time. So oftentimes my paper notes are a mess.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Interesting. I always have my notes window open in one half of my monitors. I use it for everything while developing, including pseudocode, developing SQL queries, planning my changes, etc. I use it as a digital scratchpad.
    - machawinka 7y ago
      Same. This process works but I have realized the crucial need of tags.
  - TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
    I started out taking hand written notes decades ago but got annoyed when I couldn't easily search through them. Ever since, I just keep a giant text file in Emacs and heavily rely on the 'occur' command. Using these more sophisticated tools would actually require me to do some actual WORK...
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ggm 7y ago
I wish orgmode would apply Todo to simple bullet or number lists and not only * * (.. ) form. I wish orgmode used space)tab indents not / * * /* * * stacking
- rgoulter 7y ago
  > Tab intends and not * stacking The org-hide-leading-stars variable visually hides the leading stars, which sounds like it might suit your preference. https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-appearance.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-appearance.html > TODO to simple bullet or numbered lists Org-mode lists can have checkboxes (like markdown has on GitHub). https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html But I feel this is exasperated by org-headings not having a 'closing' syntax (like XML elements). Since you can't "close" a heading, you can't easily just continue the content of a heading after the content of its sub-headings; so to have a 'TODO' list within the contents of a heading, subheadings aren't an option.
  - ggm 7y ago
    Thanks TIL
- samatman 7y ago
  I'm actually working on a literate programming environment that's similar to Org-mode. One of the early design decisions was to use lists, not headers, for Todo-type functionality. I haven't updated the github repo in awhile and it's under the radar for a few more months, but you can read a design document here https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/orb/notes/orb.orb https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/orb/notes/orb.or... Although it's easier to read the woken Markdown documentation, despite a couple errors: https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/doc/md/notes/orb.md https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/doc/md/notes/orb... It's self-hosting as well.
lbj 7y ago
I used to be a religious Org-mode user. Over time, accumulating lots of info and time registrations, I felt I lost the big picture.
- bzg 7y ago
  What did you lose exactly? How can we feel in love again with Org?
geokon 7y ago
is asciidoc similarly powerful? I have everything in org/githubpages but I often get a bit frustrated with Emacs and its clunkiness. My issue is that orgmode has no spec and is so tightly coupled to Emacs - so ive ended up unintentionally married to the whole ecosystem.. I've been considering migrating away from org but I don't have any great alternative in mind
- jolmg 7y ago
  Asciidoc seems to be just a format. For me, the main benefits of org-mode are the Emacs keybindings to handle the docs semantically, to e.g. move the headings around, nest a whole hierarchy, archive a heading, etc. Also, the agenda view is really useful. I've been using org-mode mostly to keep day-by-day notes in files such as ~/org/diary/2020-02-15.org, which I create for a given day from a keybinding. I've been thinking of starting to make personal backlogs in the form of org-mode files, keeping the headings ordered by priority, and archiving each heading when I'm done with them. All the benefit of using org-mode here comes from the keybindings. > My issue is that orgmode has no spec and is so tightly coupled to Emacs The spec is the org-mode manual. What other programs do, like Orgzly on Android, is to just support what they can of the format. They don't need to have feature-parity with org-mode on Emacs to be useful.
  - rudedogg 7y ago
    Spec for the curious: https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html
- nextos 7y ago
  What do you find clunky about org-mode within Emacs? For me it's the opposite, all other tools feel primitive compared to Org, which has really simple and powerful primitives. You can easily adapt it to implement any productivity and knowledge management methodology.
- samatman 7y ago
  I get annoyed when other people repeat messages on HN, so I won't do that here: I'm working on a format like orgmode but with an actual specification and standalone implementation. You can find links elsewhere in this thread. It's not ready for primetime, but it's getting close; there's years of work ahead before it can do everything orgmode does, but as a literate programming environment, it works great. As long as you stick to Lua. Making it work with Jupyter kernels is the next major phase of the project.
rgoulter 7y ago
I've seen it suggested before that while 'tasks' need to be well-structured, reference/notes don't. I like the idea of not trying to store notes in a hierarchy, but using search and/or tags to try and reference (or discover relations between) notes. I like the article's emphasis on "how do I want to access this later?". TBH Sometimes I've looked up previous bookmarks or notes, and they didn't have the keywords or tags I was expecting. I'd suggest https://github.com/EFLS/zetteldeft https://github.com/EFLS/zetteldeft as another project which more/less supports some of the workflow suggested in the article. That said, yeah, I do prefer pen and paper for worklog notes.
- feanaro 7y ago
  > TBH Sometimes I've looked up previous bookmarks or notes, and they didn't have the keywords or tags I was expecting. I also use a personal set of scripts for Zettelkasten (in combination with rofi) and I do encounter this sometimes. I've come to the conclusion that it's not a large problem: as long as you find the notes you're looking for most of the time, it's good. I think the problem of always finding all notes that are relevant to each search is too hard and has diminishing returns. It's best to simply avoid it by relaxing your expectations.
  - efls 7y ago
    Part of the Zettelkasten philosophy is that it requires you to actively work on links between notes. Some notes are simply forgotten, Luhmann (the original Zettelkasten master) used to say, unless they are indexed into your system.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      Yes, and I do actively work on the links. My point is there is no need for perfection here. Good enough is good enough. If some of the notes are forgotten, so be it. I place my requirements and expectations on the system as a whole, not on each particular note. If the overall system is useful and serves me well, I don't care if some of the notes are forgotten and I've reduced my workload and note loss anxiety by several orders of magnitude. This is what I meant by diminishing returns. However, with full-text search, it's hard to imagine how any note could be forgotten completely, unless it contains no text at all. This is something Luhmann did not have.
terminaljunkid 7y ago
I find org mode little complicated for my taste. My note taking is some plain text files in hierarchy and vim. It works even on Android phone using termux. And I am pretty much used to it. For todo, I have a shellscript that takes an argument and open text file of that name. Works reasonably well. Plus, prefix your text files with .md and get all the formatting stuff.
- woadwarrior01 7y ago
  Have you tried vimwiki[1]? I’ve been using it for a daily journal for the past couple of weeks and it’s been quite good. I was using it for tasks as well, but then found Taskwarrior[2] and have since moved on to using it. [1]: https://vimwiki.github.io/ https://vimwiki.github.io/ [2]: https://taskwarrior.org/ https://taskwarrior.org/
  - terminaljunkid 7y ago
    I am not a prolific vim user, I used nano for same purpose a month ago, where its keybindings were so customized that I thought I'd rather take a chance to learn vim (I am a student). Have heard about vimwiki. But maybe because I am a student, text files suffice for my purpose. Thanks for reminding about it.
animalnewbie 7y ago
What level of emacs knowledge does org mode require such that it is actually useful to me and can do stuff Microsoft onenote cannot?
- rgoulter 7y ago
  Depends what your use-cases are. If you want good, painless syncing between devices, and good mobile use: this would require quite some effort to get org-mode as good as OneNote's. Org-Babel is an example of something that org can do but OneNote can't. (e.g. showing the results of code blocks in the same markup file). It would be straightforward to make use of this without very much Emacs knowledge, but the Emacs UX isn't great out of the box. Or maybe some other feature of org-mode might be useful to have with your notes. https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html e.g. I like the org-agenda. I haven't used exporting org files into PDF or presentations, but I could see it being useful for people who use it. You'd be fine getting on without needing to learn much Emacs (beyond a relevant tutorial for the feature), not counting aforementioned Emacs default configuration. -- I think the momentum of "I can do a bunch of different things in org" comes incrementally, rather than starting using several features of org.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I love org mode, but to be honest I think the killer feature of org mode is that it is implemented in the same editor I use for programming. In fact, I had moved from Emacs to Vim several years prior, but moved back to Emacs simply for org mode (and luckily Evil is good enough that I don't really miss Vim at all). Additionally, everything is ascii. There aren't different editors for different kinds of objects because there aren't different kinds of objects. Even tables are just arbitrary pipes, dashes and pluses. I can hack together something that looks kind of like a row in a table, say, "Emacs, please format that to look pretty" and then carry on hacking away. Dates are just text until I tell Emacs, "Oh, please make that date tomorrow". And then it's just text again. I can do crazy things like write some code in one and think, "Oh I need to remember to check that constant to see if it's right". Then I hit a button and I've got a TODO with either a link to the line of the code, or even a link with the context of the code so that stays valid if the line moves. When I am going through my TODOs, I press a button and my TODO list pops up. I press another button and it jumps to my code. I edit it. Rinse and repeat. It's all just normal text in my normal text editor. I don't think there is anything at all like it.
jethroksy 7y ago
Hi! Author here, happy to answer any questions.
- giloux 7y ago
  I'm in the process of moving all my organization stuff into org-mode. This includes agenda, todo lists, project management and notes. This is a long process with a lot of fine tunings and try/errors. But, for me it's like what you said about writing : it's in the process of doing it that you think. This helps me understand my actual needs. And emacs/orgmode is so powerfull and customizable that it's a very goos tool to do that. Some weeks ago, I read your series of articles about org-mode workflow. I was especially insterested by the one about zettelkasten. This was a trigger for me to switch my notes into org-mode. So I would like first to thank you for your good quality articles ! What interests me in your new package is the automatic link/backlink detection between notes. This is a really great feature I was missing that in the other packages. I'm currently using zetteldeft and I insert hashtags into my notes to be able to search them by tag. I would like to try org-roam. My question is : in what way should I modify my current note files to be compatible with org-roam ?
  - jethroksy 7y ago
    Glad you enjoyed the articles! > My question is : in what way should I modify my current note files to be compatible with org-roam ? In contrast to zetteldeft, the links in org-roam are real file links. This means you need to replace all of the zetteldeft links with actual org file-links. That should be all the changes required I think.
    - giloux314 7y ago
      I just gave it a try. It is so easy to insert a link/backlink ! Adopted.
      - jethroksy 7y ago
        good to hear (: feel free to make feature requests/bug reports on the repo. It should become a lot more stable soon, then we can start making it more awesome.
animalnewbie 7y ago
All this is good but then those notes aren't accessible on my phone
- noelwelsh 7y ago
  There are a few apps that support org-mode. For Android there is http://www.orgzly.com/ http://www.orgzly.com/ For iOS there is https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/ I think there are a few more but those are the ones I see people talk about.
  - harperlee 7y ago
    My problem is with the corporate firewall that inhibits me from using dropbox/box/etc. to sync notes between my mobile phone and the work laptop. Just yesterday I tried to connect through Github (which I can access, for the time being), and running a "Working Copy" (an iphone app) webdav server that shares the github repo clone in the phone with Beorg. It was completely unusable. Does anyone have an alternate suggestion, perchance?
    - jaipilot747 7y ago
      Setup a hook that exports to HTML and send the file to your mail? Not an elegant solution, but gets the job done.
  - komali2 7y ago
    I don't think orgzly will handle some of the custom org packages the author is talking about so unless you can get really good at org searches it'll be a mess on the phone. For example every file will blitz the sidebar.

296 points by noelwelsh 7y ago

Jethro Kuan’s earlier posts on Org mode for planning finally made the idea click for me (maybe just the last straw on the camel’s back). I strongly recommend checking those out too. Btw, to Notion users — does anyone feel that it’s matched/surpassed Org mode in the breadth of workflows it supports?

rushsteve1 7y ago
I've actually been flip-flopping between Notion and Org-mode for months, and just the other day decided to finally organize myself all on Notion. I love Org-mode, and will likely continue to use it for various things, but I agree that Notion is the only thing that (to me) surpasses it.
- immigrantsheep 7y ago
  My two biggest problem with notion are no offline storage of data and monthly payments.
  - Scarbutt 7y ago
    Yeah, notion looks great but for this particular case, the part the about being tied to a montnly fee to be able to write my personal notes didn't felt right. Also the friction to write notes felt higher, unless you leave your browser always opened and logged in.
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    It's now free if you have an academic email. Obviously that doesn't apply to most people, but it was enough to get me to at least create an account.
- bollockitis 7y ago
  I also moved from org to Notion and have mixed feelings about it. Notion is an amazing platform. In some ways, it’s revolutionary, but everything I store in Notion feels... haphazard. It’s easy to get lost in. Org feels more structured, less Notion is so flexible that it can be almost anything but I still don’t have the ability to extend it like I can with org. It’s also slow and, as is common with Electron apps, a resource hog that I frequently need to restart to keep its appetite under control. There is considerable lag when doing simple things and the keystroke latency is brutal. I don’t mind paying for it though. I prefer it, actually. I think I’m going to stick with it anyway. It’s so good in so many ways and I hope it will only improve with time.
- mariomeissner 7y ago
  For those of you using Notion, what system do you follow to organize your notes? Is anyone here actively using something similar to Zettelkasten inside Notion?
  - wortelefant 7y ago
    my Notion/Zettelkasten practice is inspired by this thread: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-on https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-on I still don't completely trust the manual ordering of the entries to be persistent, but for notetaking/archiving it has worked well so far. I recently started to write longer notes on one topic, sometimes including passages from several articles, instead of adhering to the size limitations of a paper card
animalnewbie 7y ago
What is notion?
- ubercow13 7y ago
  They have good SEO
  - verletx64 7y ago
    They have good platform too.
- verletx64 7y ago
  I would say it's primarily a web application for note taking (there's some auxiliary capabilities around kanban boards, etc, but most people I know who use it, use it as a rich text editor). I think where Notion differs from others, and where it has similarity to Org-Mode is it's ability to create 'blocks' with more dynamic behaviours (calendars, kanban blocks, tables) as well as how easy it is to create linkages between pages.
- johntash 7y ago
  It's SaaS only, so no locally stored data. https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so
jlevers 7y ago
I have two issues with Notion -- first, it's not _quite_ fast enough. I find myself avoiding taking notes with Notion because I don't feel like waiting for the page to load, the search to find what I'm looking for, and so on. And second, as someone else mentioned, it feels kind of structurally disorganized.

shakezula 7y ago

> Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. – Richard Feynman I haven’t ever found a quote that described how i approach software as succinctly as this. I use a bullet journal religiously and it’s specifically because of this. Great article.

juandazapata 7y ago
Out of curiosity, is your bullet journal digital?
- shakezula 7y ago
  No, it's physical. That's on purpose, because it requires me to sit down at the beginning of my day and pull it out. The writing and routine of it is very therapeutic. I normally do it over my morning coffee and reddit/hn browsing.
jph00 7y ago
I can't seem to find a reliable source for this quote though. Anyone know of one?
- karlicoss 7y ago
  Closest I know is this [0] interview > Weiner: > Well, the work was done in your head but the record of it is still here. > Feynman: > No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. OK? [0] https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5020-5#annotations:VJkQwDSeEeqSYq_Uw7vQRA https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.aip.org/history-programs...
  - loevborg 7y ago
    Thanks so much for digging this up! So the version in the article is a pseudo-quote?
chrisweekly 7y ago

zelly 7y ago

I used to use Evernote then org-mode heavily but switched to pen and paper notes and haven't looked back. Whenever I used org-mode I started tweaking Emacs and writing macros for hours.

MarcScott 7y ago
Yeah, I'm a big emacs and org mode fan, but use pen and paper now for note taking. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my note pad sits at my desk as a constant reminder of what needs to be done. Org files sit in my file system and are often forgotten.
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  I take notes in class or in a meeting with pen and paper mainly because tablets still suck at this and typing on a phone isn't much better. The downside to this is organizing them after the fact. Especially if you don't have a lot of free time. So oftentimes my paper notes are a mess.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Interesting. I always have my notes window open in one half of my monitors. I use it for everything while developing, including pseudocode, developing SQL queries, planning my changes, etc. I use it as a digital scratchpad.
  - machawinka 7y ago
    Same. This process works but I have realized the crucial need of tags.
- TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
  I started out taking hand written notes decades ago but got annoyed when I couldn't easily search through them. Ever since, I just keep a giant text file in Emacs and heavily rely on the 'occur' command. Using these more sophisticated tools would actually require me to do some actual WORK...
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ggm 7y ago

I wish orgmode would apply Todo to simple bullet or number lists and not only * * (.. ) form. I wish orgmode used space)tab indents not / * * /* * * stacking

rgoulter 7y ago
> Tab intends and not * stacking The org-hide-leading-stars variable visually hides the leading stars, which sounds like it might suit your preference. https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-appearance.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-appearance.html > TODO to simple bullet or numbered lists Org-mode lists can have checkboxes (like markdown has on GitHub). https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html But I feel this is exasperated by org-headings not having a 'closing' syntax (like XML elements). Since you can't "close" a heading, you can't easily just continue the content of a heading after the content of its sub-headings; so to have a 'TODO' list within the contents of a heading, subheadings aren't an option.
- ggm 7y ago
  Thanks TIL
samatman 7y ago
I'm actually working on a literate programming environment that's similar to Org-mode. One of the early design decisions was to use lists, not headers, for Todo-type functionality. I haven't updated the github repo in awhile and it's under the radar for a few more months, but you can read a design document here https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/orb/notes/orb.orb https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/orb/notes/orb.or... Although it's easier to read the woken Markdown documentation, despite a couple errors: https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/doc/md/notes/orb.md https://github.com/mnemnion/orb/blob/master/doc/md/notes/orb... It's self-hosting as well.

lbj 7y ago

I used to be a religious Org-mode user. Over time, accumulating lots of info and time registrations, I felt I lost the big picture.

bzg 7y ago
What did you lose exactly? How can we feel in love again with Org?

geokon 7y ago

is asciidoc similarly powerful? I have everything in org/githubpages but I often get a bit frustrated with Emacs and its clunkiness. My issue is that orgmode has no spec and is so tightly coupled to Emacs - so ive ended up unintentionally married to the whole ecosystem.. I've been considering migrating away from org but I don't have any great alternative in mind

jolmg 7y ago
Asciidoc seems to be just a format. For me, the main benefits of org-mode are the Emacs keybindings to handle the docs semantically, to e.g. move the headings around, nest a whole hierarchy, archive a heading, etc. Also, the agenda view is really useful. I've been using org-mode mostly to keep day-by-day notes in files such as ~/org/diary/2020-02-15.org, which I create for a given day from a keybinding. I've been thinking of starting to make personal backlogs in the form of org-mode files, keeping the headings ordered by priority, and archiving each heading when I'm done with them. All the benefit of using org-mode here comes from the keybindings. > My issue is that orgmode has no spec and is so tightly coupled to Emacs The spec is the org-mode manual. What other programs do, like Orgzly on Android, is to just support what they can of the format. They don't need to have feature-parity with org-mode on Emacs to be useful.
- rudedogg 7y ago
  Spec for the curious: https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html
nextos 7y ago
What do you find clunky about org-mode within Emacs? For me it's the opposite, all other tools feel primitive compared to Org, which has really simple and powerful primitives. You can easily adapt it to implement any productivity and knowledge management methodology.
samatman 7y ago
I get annoyed when other people repeat messages on HN, so I won't do that here: I'm working on a format like orgmode but with an actual specification and standalone implementation. You can find links elsewhere in this thread. It's not ready for primetime, but it's getting close; there's years of work ahead before it can do everything orgmode does, but as a literate programming environment, it works great. As long as you stick to Lua. Making it work with Jupyter kernels is the next major phase of the project.

rgoulter 7y ago

I've seen it suggested before that while 'tasks' need to be well-structured, reference/notes don't. I like the idea of not trying to store notes in a hierarchy, but using search and/or tags to try and reference (or discover relations between) notes. I like the article's emphasis on "how do I want to access this later?". TBH Sometimes I've looked up previous bookmarks or notes, and they didn't have the keywords or tags I was expecting. I'd suggest https://github.com/EFLS/zetteldeft https://github.com/EFLS/zetteldeft as another project which more/less supports some of the workflow suggested in the article. That said, yeah, I do prefer pen and paper for worklog notes.

feanaro 7y ago
> TBH Sometimes I've looked up previous bookmarks or notes, and they didn't have the keywords or tags I was expecting. I also use a personal set of scripts for Zettelkasten (in combination with rofi) and I do encounter this sometimes. I've come to the conclusion that it's not a large problem: as long as you find the notes you're looking for most of the time, it's good. I think the problem of always finding all notes that are relevant to each search is too hard and has diminishing returns. It's best to simply avoid it by relaxing your expectations.
- efls 7y ago
  Part of the Zettelkasten philosophy is that it requires you to actively work on links between notes. Some notes are simply forgotten, Luhmann (the original Zettelkasten master) used to say, unless they are indexed into your system.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Yes, and I do actively work on the links. My point is there is no need for perfection here. Good enough is good enough. If some of the notes are forgotten, so be it. I place my requirements and expectations on the system as a whole, not on each particular note. If the overall system is useful and serves me well, I don't care if some of the notes are forgotten and I've reduced my workload and note loss anxiety by several orders of magnitude. This is what I meant by diminishing returns. However, with full-text search, it's hard to imagine how any note could be forgotten completely, unless it contains no text at all. This is something Luhmann did not have.

terminaljunkid 7y ago

I find org mode little complicated for my taste. My note taking is some plain text files in hierarchy and vim. It works even on Android phone using termux. And I am pretty much used to it. For todo, I have a shellscript that takes an argument and open text file of that name. Works reasonably well. Plus, prefix your text files with .md and get all the formatting stuff.

woadwarrior01 7y ago
Have you tried vimwiki[1]? I’ve been using it for a daily journal for the past couple of weeks and it’s been quite good. I was using it for tasks as well, but then found Taskwarrior[2] and have since moved on to using it. [1]: https://vimwiki.github.io/ https://vimwiki.github.io/ [2]: https://taskwarrior.org/ https://taskwarrior.org/
- terminaljunkid 7y ago
  I am not a prolific vim user, I used nano for same purpose a month ago, where its keybindings were so customized that I thought I'd rather take a chance to learn vim (I am a student). Have heard about vimwiki. But maybe because I am a student, text files suffice for my purpose. Thanks for reminding about it.

animalnewbie 7y ago

What level of emacs knowledge does org mode require such that it is actually useful to me and can do stuff Microsoft onenote cannot?

rgoulter 7y ago
Depends what your use-cases are. If you want good, painless syncing between devices, and good mobile use: this would require quite some effort to get org-mode as good as OneNote's. Org-Babel is an example of something that org can do but OneNote can't. (e.g. showing the results of code blocks in the same markup file). It would be straightforward to make use of this without very much Emacs knowledge, but the Emacs UX isn't great out of the box. Or maybe some other feature of org-mode might be useful to have with your notes. https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html e.g. I like the org-agenda. I haven't used exporting org files into PDF or presentations, but I could see it being useful for people who use it. You'd be fine getting on without needing to learn much Emacs (beyond a relevant tutorial for the feature), not counting aforementioned Emacs default configuration. -- I think the momentum of "I can do a bunch of different things in org" comes incrementally, rather than starting using several features of org.
mikekchar 7y ago
I love org mode, but to be honest I think the killer feature of org mode is that it is implemented in the same editor I use for programming. In fact, I had moved from Emacs to Vim several years prior, but moved back to Emacs simply for org mode (and luckily Evil is good enough that I don't really miss Vim at all). Additionally, everything is ascii. There aren't different editors for different kinds of objects because there aren't different kinds of objects. Even tables are just arbitrary pipes, dashes and pluses. I can hack together something that looks kind of like a row in a table, say, "Emacs, please format that to look pretty" and then carry on hacking away. Dates are just text until I tell Emacs, "Oh, please make that date tomorrow". And then it's just text again. I can do crazy things like write some code in one and think, "Oh I need to remember to check that constant to see if it's right". Then I hit a button and I've got a TODO with either a link to the line of the code, or even a link with the context of the code so that stays valid if the line moves. When I am going through my TODOs, I press a button and my TODO list pops up. I press another button and it jumps to my code. I edit it. Rinse and repeat. It's all just normal text in my normal text editor. I don't think there is anything at all like it.

jethroksy 7y ago

Hi! Author here, happy to answer any questions.

giloux 7y ago
I'm in the process of moving all my organization stuff into org-mode. This includes agenda, todo lists, project management and notes. This is a long process with a lot of fine tunings and try/errors. But, for me it's like what you said about writing : it's in the process of doing it that you think. This helps me understand my actual needs. And emacs/orgmode is so powerfull and customizable that it's a very goos tool to do that. Some weeks ago, I read your series of articles about org-mode workflow. I was especially insterested by the one about zettelkasten. This was a trigger for me to switch my notes into org-mode. So I would like first to thank you for your good quality articles ! What interests me in your new package is the automatic link/backlink detection between notes. This is a really great feature I was missing that in the other packages. I'm currently using zetteldeft and I insert hashtags into my notes to be able to search them by tag. I would like to try org-roam. My question is : in what way should I modify my current note files to be compatible with org-roam ?
- jethroksy 7y ago
  Glad you enjoyed the articles! > My question is : in what way should I modify my current note files to be compatible with org-roam ? In contrast to zetteldeft, the links in org-roam are real file links. This means you need to replace all of the zetteldeft links with actual org file-links. That should be all the changes required I think.
  - giloux314 7y ago
    I just gave it a try. It is so easy to insert a link/backlink ! Adopted.
    - jethroksy 7y ago
      good to hear (: feel free to make feature requests/bug reports on the repo. It should become a lot more stable soon, then we can start making it more awesome.

animalnewbie 7y ago

All this is good but then those notes aren't accessible on my phone

noelwelsh 7y ago
There are a few apps that support org-mode. For Android there is http://www.orgzly.com/ http://www.orgzly.com/ For iOS there is https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/ I think there are a few more but those are the ones I see people talk about.
- harperlee 7y ago
  My problem is with the corporate firewall that inhibits me from using dropbox/box/etc. to sync notes between my mobile phone and the work laptop. Just yesterday I tried to connect through Github (which I can access, for the time being), and running a "Working Copy" (an iphone app) webdav server that shares the github repo clone in the phone with Beorg. It was completely unusable. Does anyone have an alternate suggestion, perchance?
  - jaipilot747 7y ago
    Setup a hook that exports to HTML and send the file to your mail? Not an elegant solution, but gets the job done.
- komali2 7y ago
  I don't think orgzly will handle some of the custom org packages the author is talking about so unless you can get really good at org searches it'll be a mess on the phone. For example every file will blitz the sidebar.