17 ms·

Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

408 points by gjvc 6y ago

iagovar 6y ago
It looks like some people want to spend more time organizing their life than living their life. IDK man, I already need some willpower to use Trello and looks far easier.
- denzil_correa 6y ago
  XKCD : Is it Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
  - taylorlunt 6y ago
    I love that XKCD, though the person you're responding to was talking about willpower, not time.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    This assumes that there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at all. In my experience foss tools are often pushed insincerely by activists. For instance when I asked about accessing org from a phone, this person told me he sshed in and accessed it using a phone terminal emulator. Yeah... No... That's not my ideal way to organize my life.
- truncate 6y ago
  Hah, as much as I wanted org-mode to work for me, I realized I'm spending more time on building a framework for organizing my time than probably actually organizing my time. And it's never over. Sync all my calendars, OS notifications (considering the time it would take me to walk/drive), sync all this in mobile/iPad and be able to edit effectively there, and the list goes on. Laptop/Mobile notifications are the biggest ones, as if I'm not reminded on what I've to do, I will probably miss it anyways. I've found org-mode much more practical for taking notes while working, as I'm already in Emacs writing code.
  - ylk 6y ago
    I think beorg[1] solves a lot of your problems? It integrates with your calendar, shows you notifications and allows you to properly edit your entries. I found out about it through HN, iirc, and it’s how I got started with using org-mode. [1]: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    I imagine the difference is that tinkering is the appeal, for some. I like optimization as a hobby within reason but if you aren't getting anywhere quickly it hardly feels optimal. That said, I've yet to try org mode, just emacs.
    - truncate 6y ago
      Yes. I'm definitely a tinkerer, and have spent hours configuring my Emacs just the way I want. However, its super addicting and often you'll find yourself doing things with little ROI. A 20 yo me, would have definitely hacked till death, now almost 30 with job and hobbies outside tech I've to more thoughtful about ROI about the things I do (I swear if Emacs LSP doesn't perform well in emacs27, I'm going VSCode path -- and there's my unrelated rant).
- michaericalribo 6y ago
  Which isn’t always a bad thing! Having a good system to collect and organize information can be a high value skill. But org mode is not much of a tool meant to get out of your way to let you get shit done...much more an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to tune
- nanna 6y ago
  Trello will forever be the relatively slow, clunky, time-sucking platform that it is. In org mode you get faster, more efficient and more powerful as you develop, which means you don't need to summon that willpower.
  - trail2runner 6y ago
    I use Restyaboard for years now. It's much better and effective than Trello.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  I spent less time figuring out my org mode system than anything else I've tried. I just stick it all in a single file. Well, two: one for work, one for personal. It's still fast. It's still easy to pull information up when I need it.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Yeah. Many times over the years I have decided to be organised about something, or just my life in general, and made notes, taken research clippings, etc. using whatever system I designed at the time. Sometimes I look back at these years later and realise that I spent so much time creating them, never really used them, and now they are completely irrelevant or useless.
- hi_im_miles 6y ago
  For me, organizing stuff is something I enjoy to a point where I'd consider it "living my life". I get a lot of joy out of using emacs/org mode every day, but I can also totally understand someone who doesn't.
birracerveza 6y ago
Org Mode keeps being pushed again and again, but honestly this title is one of the boldest claims I've seen about it. Just look at the document. It's a 400+kb HTML page of Emacs configurations, keybindings and other stuff that makes absolutely no sense unless you've been an avid Emacs user for years. Where is the Plain Text here? I see nothing of the sort. Sure, the output might resemble Plain Text, but it's clearly not. I have nothing against it or those who use it, more power to you, but please be realistic. Sorry about the rant.
- sinkasapa 6y ago
  I suppose it is like saying: "Python: Write computer programs in plain text!" In my experience, one does actually just edit text files using org-mode. It is different than the Tasks sub-application of Thunderbird/Lightening, for instance.
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    Yeah, my first thought when I started reading your comment was “yeah, it’s a bit silly, but you can’t ‘grep’ Jira”. I’ve been a long time org user and am slowly starting to move bits of my workflow out of it to ease collaboration with the staff I’m planning to hire in the next couple months. I absolutely love Org and am not particularly happy about moving away from it, but... it seems like trying to use it in a collaborative way is not going to go well. I’ll keep using it for myself though because it’s awesome :D
    - slightwinder 6y ago
      > you can’t ‘grep’ Jira”. Well, you can, if you export your issues. Jira has a well working API. It's not hard to write a script for fetching your stuff locally. There are even one or two plugins on melpa for loading it directly into org-mode.
      - tonyarkles 6y ago
        I haven't had great luck with the melpa plugins, but I'm probably going to try it again here, maybe things have gotten better in the last couple of years. Running `grep` from the root of my Org directory gives me access to about 10 years of notes from various projects across various organizations. In hindsight, I could have tried to periodically dump things out of my clients' various project management systems for historical reference, but just using Org on its own has proven pretty effective at that :)
yur3i__ 6y ago
I do use org mode for writing documents and presentations but I feel like a lot of these 'organization' tools just result in spending more time tweaking them than actually doing the work you set out to organize.
- adimitrov 6y ago
  It's deceptive to look at a document like this and think that you'd have to use all of that knowledge and configuration in order to use org mode for planning your tasks. Much like Rome, this document wasn't written in a day. You can start using org-mode for task planning and agenda with a fresh (Doom/Spacemacs/vanilla)-Emacs install and be productive from the get go. That's what I did. Then, you add things whenever you feel like it. You may never feel like it, the default is already very powerful, and I don't have a lot of customization around agendas, etc. in my configuration. The only thing I actually do is set where my org mode files live, set a couple of keybindings, and add one agenda view. That's it. I've been using that same setup for years now. The rest of my config is merely making it a bit prettier, because default Emacs is somewhat ugly.
  - yur3i__ 6y ago
    Maybe my problem is I don't do complex enough work to warrent a tool like this (I'm still a BSc student). I do use emacs for almost everything already but I don't use anything for organization really because it just seems like a really complex way of just setting a reminder somewhere
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      I use org mode and my work is fairly simple. Never underestimate the power of being able to go back to your thought process on something you did 1, 5, or even 10 years ago.
- nojito 6y ago
  "organizational tools" Are a great business idea for this very purpose because it gives people the illusion that they are getting organized --> productive.
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enitihas 6y ago
I was a big fan of org mode, and I still think nothing beats it for free form note taking. But if your use cases are very simple todo tracking, you might want to try OmniFocus. I have bene using OmniFocus and found a very easy to use replacement. It doesn't match the flexibility of org mode but gets the job done.
- dijit 6y ago
  The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves. For context I have lost files because the old version of the software which could read the formats would not run on my operating system, and purchasing a new license for the updated version was no guarantee that it would work either as the format had changed. Yes, this is a stupid qualm to have when Excel/Word exists, but in those cases the alternative is not easily digestible plain text documents. The case for making things more proprietary and costly should come with serious considerations. Especially at $10/mo. That's more than I pay for Netflix. (FD: I'm not an org-mode or emacs user, and this was written on a Mac) Information on the '.ofocus' file format here: https://github.com/tomzx/ofocus-format https://github.com/tomzx/ofocus-format
  - danieldk 6y ago
    The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves. I am not an OmniFocus user, recent versions of OmniFocus can export data to the TaskPaper format (which is just plain text) or to a CSV file.
    - dijit 6y ago
      That is not the native format, therefore it doesn't really matter. You _can_ export Excel documents as CSV too.
  - 6y ago
tomcooks 6y ago
Can I get a quick rundown on why Org Mode is better (easier/faster/more organized/whatever you prefer) than a ~/TODO.md file? I use this format: ``` ## yyyy-mm-dd name of the homework - for tasks that have to be done ! for tasks that contain a warning, careful, beware > for tasks I am waiting for others to give me output about ? for tasks I am not sure about v for tasks I've completed x for tasks i won't do, WONTFIX ``` so, for example, today i'd have: ``` ## 2020-05-25 orgmode > ask about orgmode on hn v rant on hn about my own flatfile task management x install emacs ? look if orgmode can be tested on vi ```
- michaericalribo 6y ago
  In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. The markup is just markdown, modulo a few conventions. The power of org mode is manipulating the data / text / content you have written and marked up
  - rgoulter 6y ago
    > In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. As one example of this, org mode makes it easy to collapse/expand the content of a task.
    - michaericalribo 6y ago
      That’s a good point—the software provides new types of UI, too! I had been thinking about rearranging text and org-capture, but you’re right that another excellent feature is the ability to view and interact with text fluidly and easily
- chapium 6y ago
  Org-mode does nifty things like letting you plop a date tag anywhere and indexing it for reminders later, like 5 day outlook. Its basically text only onenote.
glxxyz 6y ago
This is what procrastination looks like.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Nicely organized procrastination though.
ropeladder 6y ago
<rant>I've been trying out orgzly as a note dump replacement for Trello on mobile. It works ok but I tried setting up actual emacs the other day in order to convert the Trello json output to .org, and the experience was horrible. I couldn't install plugins because I needed to install a plug-in manager, and I couldn't install that because I needed to install another plugin or change some obscure GPG setting. On top of this you have to learn not only a whole new set of overly complicated commands but new vocabulary as well. I finally did get it working but oof. I'll stick with vim.
- RaycatRakittra 6y ago
  Sounds like you got an amalgam of bad first impressions. Sorry to hear that! So, something that helped me get pass that inertia was learning where init.el resided and how it is loaded. After I read about that, installing a package manager that's not constrained to the minibuffer was a 3-4 line endeavour (use-package). Save, reload. After that, you might get a notification of Emacs warning you about trusting an unknown source. (I always accept here.) After that, it was a matter of using M-x use-package and installing packages that I remembered from Spacemacs: which-key, restart-emacs, swiper/counsel/ivy, and hydra were enough to get me up and running. Regarding the overly complicated commands, I agree that they're a bit lengthy but you are able to change the ergonomics of your keybindings at will. My config is heavily inspired by evil-leader and I put a lot of functionality behind "C-;". So, "C-; f p f" will open a search dialog for all of the files in the current VCS repo. This might be lengthy for some but it feels right to me. I like that about Emacs. Sorry for the rambling! If you ever decide to try it out again, feel free to message me and I'll help where I can.
pkalinowski 6y ago
It looks insanely complicated for no reason. Why do such super organisation, where you have great search at your disposal? I just have everything inside Notes folder with subfolders if any project is getting bigger. Anytime I want to look for something, I just do global text search for the whole Notes folder.
- sinkasapa 6y ago
  I suppose this is for the same reason that people structure databases. There are often non-trivial relationships between different types of information that are useful to keep track of. Citations and links are useful features for note taking.
- rgoulter 6y ago
  Notes and reference material benefits from good search tooling. But tasks or todo lists benefit from being well-organised.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Because "great search" is not even close to good enough and handles only a fraction of the features. This is like saying that excel is insanely complicated for no reason, when pen and paper exist. If this is all you need, great, but if it is not then the comparison does not even make sense.
- taylorlunt 6y ago
  There are lots of features I don't use in org. In fact, in the beginning I only used the most basic feature of keeping a foldable hierarchical text file of notes, which is basically the same thing as your Notes files, but with some nice structure editing and folding keybindings built in. But I have been slowly integrating org features into my system when I think they would be useful to me. First I started scheduling things. With org, you can schedule items and have them show up in your agenda regardless of what org file they are in. Org agenda gives you an outline of your week, and your current day, and it says how many days you have left until certain items are due. This has replaced my calendar, and feels superior to a calendar to me. Then I started using org-drill, which lets you drill org notes, emulating the spaced-repetition behavior of Anki. You could just use Anki, but it's nice to have all of your personal information management in one place, and have it editable from your text editor. I've also started using hyperlinks to make links between my org files and also to any other file on my computer, to web URLs, to executing a script, to mailto links... This has been helpful. I still don't use plenty of features, like the literate programming stuff, tables, tags, capture, etc. But I don't need to. They're there for me if I feel they would be helpful. But they're invisible to me otherwise. Org isn't "insanely complicated" because it's mostly just a text file, and the features are there for you to use if you need them, but there's no cluttered UI that actually adds any complexity.
madballster 6y ago
I do all my research, note-taking and idea brainstorming in org-mode. Couldn't live without it.
michaericalribo 6y ago
Org mode is a fun note taking tool built on top of emacs, and it’s great that it works so well for some people. But, in my experience, the hard lock-in to emacs makes it impossible to make a central part of my workflow. Plus, org mode encourages so much planning to be productive and customization that I end up without any time to get any real work done
tams 6y ago
The key to using org-mode effectively is ignoring most of the features and using only a tiny subset that you actually need. You aren't going to look like a wizard, but you are also not going to need to maintain anything ever. These kinds of cookbooks are nice to have around, but it's best to treat them as references, not guides.
- karlicoss 6y ago
  In remember seeing this exact document five years ago and being completely overwhelmed. Now, looking at this, all of these features make sense to me, but I'm far from using all of them. Agree it's more of a kitchensink reference.
dpweb 6y ago
Favorite all time personal productivity tool: ClipX (last version 15 years ago). Besides being an clipboard manager, you can save all clipboards to a text file. I have a file running 3 years and just text search it to find old information.
nanna 6y ago
Having been using Emacs and org-mode for about 4 years now, I've been thinking a big mistake has been made in how the system is pitched. It's always something about it being 'plain text', which makes non-Emacs users say 'Why would I switch from my plain text editor? Or 'Why would I switch from a flashy GUI webapp version of this particular feature?' Emacs can't be appreciated for any one feature, even org mode, powerful as that is. You have to take the entire system and all it's possibilities into account. Org mode is particularly special because it integrates so many of Emacs' features, from literate programming to keeping a Wiki, to scheduling, to keeping a diary, to file browsing, to accounting, to emailing, to so much more. But to try to judge one package like org mode is a bit like judging a car by the quality of its seats. The only thing I've experienced which compares to this is, perversely, the Office 365 suite. Yes, of course, all the functions are completely different and I'm not making a like-for-like functionality comparison. But in Office365 an email client (Outlook) is integrated with a team's documents (via Sharepoint), chats (via Teams), calendar, etc, etc. The value of Office365 isn't in any one app, it's their integration. It's the entire system. Obviously the Emacs system has a completely different and opposing design philosophy to Office365's. It's ground-up, fully-extendable, initially demanding, text based, exportable, self-hosted, free, and so on. All of which increasingly goes against the grain of the trajectory of software today. However for those who give it the time and effort, it really does offer to organise your life, and yes, in plain text.
- nanna 6y ago
  Another difference between emacs and Office 365. The code and functionality of both are also sustained by an ecosystem. For Office 365 that ecosystem is by and large constituted by the paid labour of workers employed by Microsoft, together with a minor subset of plugin contributors for certain applications. For Emacs, the ecosystem includes everyone who adopts the use of emacs. In other words, to Microsoft's system you are a customer. Microsoft may choose to adapt their system to your use case if you are lucky enough to represent a big enough user or use case. To emacs you are part of the very ecology which sustains the whole system. That's where the sense of empowerment and 'freedom' (I hate the term) comes from.
- tangue 6y ago
  That's one of he best pitch for Emacs I've ever read. I wish GNU were able to communicate that.
madballster 6y ago
I see a lot of comments arguing that it's not "worth it" to spend dozens of hours to "get into org-mode" when there are "intuitive tools" such as Evernote or Trello or Todoist etc. What some are missing is the fact that low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage. After (!) one has sunk thousands of hours into them. I used to keep my academic notes in Evernote and it turned into hell after about 2,000 notes and a few years of work. I couldn't find things when I needed them, it didn't support a non-linear mode of work. It became my personal black hole that swallowed up information but never gave it back. With org-mode I have created my very own filing and research system. After years of using it and thousands of articles I find things. Quickly. Now, with org-roam, I create hubs of knowledge and ideas that I can come back to at a later point without worrying about linearity or chronology. No longer do I need to know where things are. I know what ideas are in there. If I don't like a certain workflow, I can grow, develop or change my filing and note-taking system as I see fit. In my opinion, org-mode eliminates the risk of hitting any sort of barrier after years of sunk costs.
- purerandomness 6y ago
  Also, people forget that their favourite SaaS-du-jour probably won't be around after their "Incredible Journey" ends and there won't be a migration path, or it's going to cost too many hours to be worth it. Emacs will be here for us in the next decades, even well after our career ends, and then some.
  - nextos 6y ago
    Besides, Org is not complicated. It has lots of features, but at its core it's just a plain text outliner with hyperlinks, keywords and timestamps. Org is like Common Lisp in many ways. It offers you lots of paradigms to build your own workflows, but you don't need to use or understand them initially. An it might suffer from the same PR problem Emacs has. Manuals, tutorials and guides throw all features at once without focussing on core concepts first. And it's overwhelming for newcomers.
    - kohtatsu 6y ago
xvilka 6y ago
There is orgmode plugin also for Vim[1]. [1] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
mcshicks 6y ago
I've been an org mode user since 2012. When I started using it, I was learning emacs at the same time, really didn't know anything about lisp. But I had used a lot of other organizational systems going back to palm pilot days, I knew what I wanted. This website gave me everything I needed and I was able to start adding pieces one at time to my config file to get them working. It's a big part of my setup and I'm really grateful for the person who put it up that they did it (and kept it up to date) for a long time.
AlexAffe 6y ago
As many in here mention, org-mode has a few very good features but is much too complicated to get into. My absolute favorite for self organization is Joplin: - self hosted - markdown - file attachments - cross device - lean interface - encryption Those are my core must haves, but there is much more which really motivated me getting into Joplin.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I surprised myself when I stopped using org-mode when I "retired" (ha!) March 2019. At my last on-site job, I had to juggle managing a small deep learning team, work on 100+ US patents, and all of my own technical work and research. Org-mode was perfect to keep everything organized. Now, I rely heavily on Apple Notes (this required discovering a little app that exports the notes for backup, and also realizing that I can use the web apps in iCloud.com on my Linux laptop). This reliance on Notes may change however as just recently I have developed the habit of keeping a Mosh (like SSH) session always open between my iPhone and iPad to my remote server, with appropriate tmux setups for each device. I was just thinking yesterday about how I could now always keep a tmux pane open to emacs+org-mode.
- mr_spothawk 6y ago
  can you recommend any ways for me (a low-mid developer trying to improve my skills with e.g. tmux & mosh) to get access to the brains of mature/retiring expert level engineers? mostly i'm interested in learning these sorts of productivity patterns. unfortunately, i don't work closely with any developers. i took a job a couple years ago in order to apprentice under a linux guru, but unfortunately he left the company 2 days before i started. i was fortunate to learn a lot from the remaining team before the company shuttered 8 months later.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    If you know what specific skill you want/need to pick up (e.g., "learn to use Mosh to effectively do development on remote servers") that can be a simple web search for tutorials. I guess that the real issue is discovering what skills you don't even know about. Where ever you work, it is fair game to ask people there for advice.
- bwbmr 6y ago
  Big mosh user here myself. How do you deal with tmux limiting window size to the lowest common denominator device? I usually run a little bash script manually to disconnect other tmux sessions whenever I switch devices, which gets annoying. Also which app for Apple Notes exports do you use?
albmoriconi 6y ago
I can feel this deeply because even though I'm an Emacs user, and thoroughly like the Emacs + Org experience, I was never able to keep a working system organized with Org mode. I ended up using OmniFocus for my tasks and Notion for "information and note storing"; they have great, built-in support for the things I need to do and I spend very little time managing them and keeping them in order, so they simply do "what I need them for". They also play nice with mobile devices, images and external documents, and integrate with my Outlook calendar (something I am forced to use for work). I have no doubt that a proficient Emacs user could create something similar, even better, using only Org mode; I don't use third party configurations and keep mine to one hundred lines, more or less; when things get more complicated, I notice that I mostly end up in a game of min/maxing without getting the same amount of "useful" that I get from other systems. The big problem is that, the way I'm running now, I don't own my data; OmniFocus worries me particularly because, as already said in other comments, it's Apple-only. Notion worries me too: I wish them all the best, but what happens if they go out of business? Sure, I can export everything in plain text, but the structure of my data would be pretty hard to recreate in another system. Even though configuration + Org files amount to some amount of complexity, I can have trust that their format is long lived and that they are stored where I decide. This is a sort of "peace of mind" I can relate with, and that I have somehow lost when I decided to use these other systems; however I am infinitely more satisfied with two systems that do "exactly what I want"; I hope to find a way to reconcile these ends sometimes, but for the moment Org mode is "only" my outlining tool of choice.
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iixmiix 6y ago
nice! thx, that is exactly what I need right now! Since remote work happened, I use a big single org file, with headers and a date here or there. Now I have the opportunity to fix this and a guide to how.
dpbriggs 6y ago
Recent CS graduate here. Used org-mode for every assignment and report. Used it at every internship. Will be using it in my full-time work. Use it at work to automate pull-request bureaucracy and notes. Use it for design notes and render into other formats. It's the highest productivity format I have ever encountered, and we haven't even touched org-agenda.
- throwaway286 6y ago
  How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests? Do you make the pull request inside emacs? Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch? Or something else?
  - dpbriggs 6y ago
    Preface: I like very detailed pull-requests. For me this includes JIRA information and implementation notes. Most of my recent work has been backend API stuff, and org-babel/restclient [0] lets me do fast test-driven-development in the same file. These inputs / outputs are included in the PR render so it's easy to see what the API is doing. > How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests? I have a script called 'new_jira $JIRA_NUMBER' which pulls relevant JIRA information from the REST API and generates an org-mode file. I do my work and list implementation details, gotchas, and generally narrate work done. Details are light for easy tickets, and heavy on complex ones. Finally, render it as markdown and copy/paste in the GitHub PR field. I also include tips / tricks if it's not appropriate to comment directly in the code base. I come back and search for these later (knowledge base). > Do you make the pull request inside emacs? I've usually faced admin issues trying to get the necessary tokens to make PRs in emacs. Just render, copy & paste in the PR title/description field. > Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch? That's right. All work relevant to a particular ticket is captured in a single org-mode file. I keep my git history clean and well documented so it's not necessary to use these files to understand commit history though. > Or something else? For work unrelated to the JIRA flow (e.g. security bug hunting) I use org-mode to track the entire narrative and use org-babel to inline code necessary for the exploit. This makes security reporting easy as I just render as PDF and shoot it off to the security people. [0] https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el
Syzygies 6y ago
Starting in 2005, I've been keeping dated text files in a Log folder, organized by year and month. Anytime I need digital "scrap paper" I make sure I keep it. If I need to save files, I open instead a dated log folder. There's a critical optimization problem here the young often get wrong. One needs to "Huffman code" the work put into organizing on entry, versus the work later in retrieving. For example, I save physical receipts into four rotating bins by quarter, then I vacuum pack the old receipts and stash them in the garage. Occasionally I save hundreds of dollars by proving I shipped something (and that would be a receipt I probably scanned) but any more work than this on entry would be a mistake. It's the complete lack of organizational structure, other than date, that make my log files so useful. I instead get good at including keywords, always asking how I would find this later. I never have to wonder whether I filed this under "garden" or "tomatoes", resorting to a system-wide search. And this system has survived many editor migrations. I agree with the arguments not to use a commercial system. That's like putting an aspirational cookbook on your coffee table. Org Mode is also too structured on entry to be optimal for me.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Regarding physical hoarding of bills, you should consider investing in a scansnap scanner - you can throw paper that's barely organized into a pile and it'll scan both sides into fully ocr'ed beautifully corrected duplex PDFs. Can't imagine life without it anymore!
- ebertucc 6y ago
  > It's the complete lack of organizational structure, other than date, that make my log files so useful. A thread here about a week ago on bookmark management reinforced this idea for me.[1] When it comes to general knowledge management, complex, predefined taxonomies don't feel worth the overhead when retrieval is so often ad hoc and messy. Grepping about in log files for keywords usually does the trick. Tags are nice, but like you say, getting good at including searchable keywords performs a similar function. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228861
M2Ys4U 6y ago
I tried to use Org Mode at work last year, to take meeting notes, track time spent on the 12 different projects I have to chip in to and to organise my calendar. It was okay, but I didn't (and still don't) use Emacs for anything else. I get the impression that unless you live your life entirely in Emacs then it's just not worth it.
Altheasy 6y ago
No thanks
olivierestsage 6y ago
YMMV, but Emacs and Org Mode have made my life finally seem manageable after basically a lifetime of struggling to keep track of everything. If that sounds like you, it might be worth your time to try.
- mr_spothawk 6y ago
  would you be willing to put up a few screenshare videos describing your workflow?
amake 6y ago
I take all my work notes in org-mode and had a hard time viewing them on my iPad, so I made a cross-platform mobile reader app: https://orgro.org https://orgro.org (It's FOSS but available on the App Store and Google Play for convenience. It will be available on F-Droid soon as well.)
- tra3 6y ago
  It'd be great if there's was a trial option.
  - amake 6y ago
    I wish the stores let you do that easily :( If you're on Android then you can wait for F-Droid, or you can get an automatic refund from Google Play if you uninstall it shortly after purchase. Otherwise you can always build and install from source, since it's FOSS.
jypepin 6y ago
am I bad for not having a personal notes system or even not taking notes about anything? I feel like any time I take notes on something, I rarely (read, _never_) go back to them, mostly because I don't care or just forgot I took those notes.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Org mode has always been too flexible for me. The lack of constraints on what could be done made it very hard to actually create a system that was reliable for me. Also, I stopped using Emacs as my daily driver when I started working in Java professionally.
souterrain 6y ago
Former org-mode user here. One of the anti-features of emacs/org-mode for certain people, particularly those who get obsessed with tooling, travel down technology rabbitholes, and are subject to crippling bouts of procrastination, is the extensibility and the common paradigm that one should do everything in emacs. Ultimately, I switched to using specific tools for specific tasks. For example, I found Zotero a much better way of managing research, while still allowing export to BibTeX. I still can organize in plain text, I just avoid getting tripped up with endless tool maintenance and customization.
tkuraku 6y ago
I like the idea of Org Mode, but for me it is just a painful to use. Vscode with the "Markdown All in One" does everything I could possibly need. It is still plain text and it should be portable to any tool that can display markdown files. The biggest draw is the keyboard shortcuts are far less complicated and more ergonomic (though perhaps less powerful than emacs, but that is fine with me). edit: Also interestingly Vscode feels much more cross platform for me. I have tried to get Emacs running on windows and it wasn't a good experience.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately, while Emacs on Windows works, it kind of feels like a fish pulled out of the water. What I do when I work on Windows machines is build and launch Emacs under WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), and use an X Server on the Windows side (VcXsrv) to get a GUI window.
clircle 6y ago
A very simple org-mode workflow that I use to great effect is to just use org-capture and org-agenda and basically ignore all the other features.
ericsoderstrom 6y ago
As a vim user, I've wanted to learn org mode for years. I kept thinking I had to start by learning vanilla emacs and then progress to org mode. Recently I've tried starting with doom emacs which emulates the vim keybinds and found it to be much easier going. I'd recommend it to any vim users wanting to get in to org mode.
kmstout 6y ago
I've been playing with org-mode as the basis for a literate programming workflow. So far, the results have been nice, though tangling is slow. (For that, I wrote little tool to do the tangling for me, including following the noweb references. Combined with inotifywait, this gives me tangle-on-save.) The most detailed org LP example I have is at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/master/2020/05/05/index.org https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reindeereffect/reindeereff... the tangled products are at https://github.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/tree/master/2020/05/05 https://github.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/t... and the "woven" HTML is at https://reindeereffect.github.io/2020/05/05/index.html https://reindeereffect.github.io/2020/05/05/index.html Sometime in the near future I'll split the LP tools off from the rest of my configuration so that others can use them more easily, if they're so inclined.
christiansakai 6y ago
I use vim, so what is my alternative? Not gonna learn emacs for the sake of org mode.
- quazar 6y ago
  You should try. I also was a loyal vim user, but OrgMode was so wonderful I switched to two-editor solution. Emacs for OrgMode and vim for everything else. Remember, that you don't actually have to learn Emacs, like you had to learn vim to use it. It's just an ordinary text-editor, no huge upfront time investment is needed, especially if all you are after is OrgMode.
  - christiansakai 6y ago
    Okay, I'll consider giving it a try!
- noidesto 6y ago
  Doom emacs
sudhirkhanger 6y ago
Is there something that could sync text/org files as seamlessly as Evernote/Google Keep does?
- noidesto 6y ago
  Syncthing
  - sudhirkhanger 6y ago
    Don't two devices have to be online at the same time?
streb-lo 6y ago
For people who just want a very simple CLI to manage tasks/todos I would definitely recommend task warrior: https://taskwarrior.org/ https://taskwarrior.org/
amphitheatre 6y ago
I love the concepts and workflow that org-mode, as well at surrounding extensions, promote. What I rue, however, is how tightly it is married to Emacs. vim extensions for it aren't up to the same level yet, and the mobile apps for org-mode are quite lacking, after trying them. It just seems like it has so much promise, and people have done a lot of interesting things with it, but it's clouded behind this learning curve and toolchain.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
My life is now organized just in time to die of old age learning this system. I'm the most organized dead-guy I guess. When my scroll bar turns into a tiny square in the top right of the window for something as trivial as a note-taking system I nope right out of there.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Org is not a note taking system. It’s an emacs app that can do a lot and that you can use and tweak as you want. Note taking, todo list, calendar, scientific notebook, literate programming, bibliography, ... It allows to mix static (what you insert) and dynamic (code execution, graph generation, tables, images, spreadsheets). The author logged how he customized his setup to do whatever he needed and shared it. I found great tips there. I fail to understand the negativity in the comments for such hacker friendly system and submission.
  - gjvc 6y ago
    > I fail to understand the negativity in the comments for such hacker friendly system and submission. One would have thought that a programmable editor (using LISP, no less) would be held in high regard by the majority of people on here. Just goes to show that you can't please all of the people all of the time.
    - jeromenerf 6y ago
      > Just goes to show that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Maybe these people are hackers who hack as-in "hacksaw", to punch a hole quickly. There is no sense of urgency in the french synonyms etymology.
Darkstryder 6y ago
The first section of this article is called "How To Use This Document" and it immediately reminded me of: https://xkcd.com/1343/ https://xkcd.com/1343/
its-tony 6y ago
It's interesting, never used it although it looks like it would require more time than it could actually save. The very best products I've encountered are the exact opposite, so easy to use that they feel like they're essentially useless. Organising life is an abstract monster that no one has ever gotten even close solving it. The question of how do make the most out of our time in our short and unpredictable lifetimes has become somewhat intriguing and boggling to me. Over the years I've been playing around with a architecture of a tool that would take a crack at this ambiguous challenge. If someone's interested in trying out an early version, feel free to leave your email here. https://forms.gle/tqpuNpfdpdB3DZLi9 https://forms.gle/tqpuNpfdpdB3DZLi9.
gexla 6y ago
Lots of comments about Org mode being complicated. This link shouldn't be representative. This is the culmination of an iterative effort over years. I don't know the history behind it and not a hardcore user. But I would suggest start out with basics and building slow. Bring in what's useful and learn that well before moving on to other things. I would not drink in this entire doc all at once.
cachestash 6y ago
Yet another org mode will change your life post.
shanemhansen 6y ago
I love org mode and use it every day. It's killer misfeature for me is I can't collaborate on wikis or Google docs with org mode. I've seen a great org mode webapp here, but Google drive permissions means you are forced to grant the webapp read/write to everything (not just a folder or mimetype). In spite of that I still use it because I've never seen anything like it in terms of functionality.
ftwynn 6y ago
So I started taking a course recently based on an HN post about putting everything in org-mode: https://tasshin.com/blog/implementing-a-second-brain-in-emacs-and-org-mode/ https://tasshin.com/blog/implementing-a-second-brain-in-emac... What I found pretty quickly was that org-mode is great for organizing things in emacs. BUT if you ingest any meaningful amount of ideas from outside of emacs, it gets orders of magnitude more difficult to put your "whole life" in there. Emacs was built in a pre-web, pre-mobile world, and it's a frustrating experience to try and wire those up to emacs. There are some helper packages, to be sure, but tools like Evernote have seamless capture built across all the platforms without any effort on my part. I found once I'd decided to switch from using org-mode to using Evernote as my life organizing destination a whole class of challenges simply disappared. In my opinion, we should use the right tool for the job. Org-mode, by the nature of living in emacs land, is very difficult to actually get you whole life into, even if it would be nice to organize once you did so.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
One very special use-case for org-mode I have in "my life" is literate programming. I've not used any other tool, that can do this as well as org-mode. (1) I can export to many formats. (2) I can choose what to code export (source blocks). (3) I can choose what code to run on export. (4) I can give names to source blocks and then link to them in other source blocks, basically building a code dependency tree with them, allowing me to focus on one aspect at a time. (5) I can link to other source blocks out of order. (6) I can specify how the output should be put back into my document. (7) I get syntax highlighting for any language, that is usually highlighted in my Emacs. (8) I can use multiple (programming) languages. For example I could output a data table and then have another source block using GNU Plot to make a nice diagram. (9) I can write explanations next to the source blocks in a lot of detail. There is probably more, that does not come to mind just right now. Then there are some git hosts (notabug), which can render org-mode files like the usual hosts render markdown files (readme.md). So when you upload into git, you get instant readability in a rendered version, plus possibly syntax highlighting on the website. That is only one aspect where org-mode really shines. I find it also indispensable for to-do lists. Using shortcuts to check or uncheck items and recalculating done/to-do count or percentages in a higher level of the to-do list. One can prioritize headings and use tagging, to enable later filtering of headings and narrowing down visible content. One can also render Latex formulas inline for preview. If you need only standard document classes, you can go ahead and output to latex. Or you can create your own document class in your init.el file and customize everything as you would in writing Latex yourself, only that you get the benefit of writing org-mode instead. Much more focus on the content. And then of course everything is plain text, which makes this even better and easy to manage in version control. I just love org-mode! For me, easily one of the huge selling points for Emacs. The only other easy to use plain text format, that could get close was reStructuredText for me. Unfortunately there are few good reStructuredText parsers in many programming languages.
brnt 6y ago
It's not the same, but I'm using a QOwnNotes based setup. It does document-tocs, images, and a git versioned history if you wish, and a freeform fs layout for your notes which are saved as plain markdown. If emacs is what's stopping you from using orgmode, QOwnNotes may be something for you.
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking between notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but org-mode is too heavy for my purposes.

408 points by gjvc 6y ago

It looks like some people want to spend more time organizing their life than living their life. IDK man, I already need some willpower to use Trello and looks far easier.

denzil_correa 6y ago
XKCD : Is it Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- taylorlunt 6y ago
  I love that XKCD, though the person you're responding to was talking about willpower, not time.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  This assumes that there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at all. In my experience foss tools are often pushed insincerely by activists. For instance when I asked about accessing org from a phone, this person told me he sshed in and accessed it using a phone terminal emulator. Yeah... No... That's not my ideal way to organize my life.
truncate 6y ago
Hah, as much as I wanted org-mode to work for me, I realized I'm spending more time on building a framework for organizing my time than probably actually organizing my time. And it's never over. Sync all my calendars, OS notifications (considering the time it would take me to walk/drive), sync all this in mobile/iPad and be able to edit effectively there, and the list goes on. Laptop/Mobile notifications are the biggest ones, as if I'm not reminded on what I've to do, I will probably miss it anyways. I've found org-mode much more practical for taking notes while working, as I'm already in Emacs writing code.
- ylk 6y ago
  I think beorg[1] solves a lot of your problems? It integrates with your calendar, shows you notifications and allows you to properly edit your entries. I found out about it through HN, iirc, and it’s how I got started with using org-mode. [1]: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app
- slothtrop 6y ago
  I imagine the difference is that tinkering is the appeal, for some. I like optimization as a hobby within reason but if you aren't getting anywhere quickly it hardly feels optimal. That said, I've yet to try org mode, just emacs.
  - truncate 6y ago
    Yes. I'm definitely a tinkerer, and have spent hours configuring my Emacs just the way I want. However, its super addicting and often you'll find yourself doing things with little ROI. A 20 yo me, would have definitely hacked till death, now almost 30 with job and hobbies outside tech I've to more thoughtful about ROI about the things I do (I swear if Emacs LSP doesn't perform well in emacs27, I'm going VSCode path -- and there's my unrelated rant).
michaericalribo 6y ago
Which isn’t always a bad thing! Having a good system to collect and organize information can be a high value skill. But org mode is not much of a tool meant to get out of your way to let you get shit done...much more an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to tune
nanna 6y ago
Trello will forever be the relatively slow, clunky, time-sucking platform that it is. In org mode you get faster, more efficient and more powerful as you develop, which means you don't need to summon that willpower.
- trail2runner 6y ago
  I use Restyaboard for years now. It's much better and effective than Trello.
bcrosby95 6y ago
I spent less time figuring out my org mode system than anything else I've tried. I just stick it all in a single file. Well, two: one for work, one for personal. It's still fast. It's still easy to pull information up when I need it.
ubercow13 6y ago
Yeah. Many times over the years I have decided to be organised about something, or just my life in general, and made notes, taken research clippings, etc. using whatever system I designed at the time. Sometimes I look back at these years later and realise that I spent so much time creating them, never really used them, and now they are completely irrelevant or useless.
hi_im_miles 6y ago
For me, organizing stuff is something I enjoy to a point where I'd consider it "living my life". I get a lot of joy out of using emacs/org mode every day, but I can also totally understand someone who doesn't.

birracerveza 6y ago

Org Mode keeps being pushed again and again, but honestly this title is one of the boldest claims I've seen about it. Just look at the document. It's a 400+kb HTML page of Emacs configurations, keybindings and other stuff that makes absolutely no sense unless you've been an avid Emacs user for years. Where is the Plain Text here? I see nothing of the sort. Sure, the output might resemble Plain Text, but it's clearly not. I have nothing against it or those who use it, more power to you, but please be realistic. Sorry about the rant.

sinkasapa 6y ago
I suppose it is like saying: "Python: Write computer programs in plain text!" In my experience, one does actually just edit text files using org-mode. It is different than the Tasks sub-application of Thunderbird/Lightening, for instance.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  Yeah, my first thought when I started reading your comment was “yeah, it’s a bit silly, but you can’t ‘grep’ Jira”. I’ve been a long time org user and am slowly starting to move bits of my workflow out of it to ease collaboration with the staff I’m planning to hire in the next couple months. I absolutely love Org and am not particularly happy about moving away from it, but... it seems like trying to use it in a collaborative way is not going to go well. I’ll keep using it for myself though because it’s awesome :D
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    > you can’t ‘grep’ Jira”. Well, you can, if you export your issues. Jira has a well working API. It's not hard to write a script for fetching your stuff locally. There are even one or two plugins on melpa for loading it directly into org-mode.
    - tonyarkles 6y ago
      I haven't had great luck with the melpa plugins, but I'm probably going to try it again here, maybe things have gotten better in the last couple of years. Running `grep` from the root of my Org directory gives me access to about 10 years of notes from various projects across various organizations. In hindsight, I could have tried to periodically dump things out of my clients' various project management systems for historical reference, but just using Org on its own has proven pretty effective at that :)

yur3i__ 6y ago

I do use org mode for writing documents and presentations but I feel like a lot of these 'organization' tools just result in spending more time tweaking them than actually doing the work you set out to organize.

adimitrov 6y ago
It's deceptive to look at a document like this and think that you'd have to use all of that knowledge and configuration in order to use org mode for planning your tasks. Much like Rome, this document wasn't written in a day. You can start using org-mode for task planning and agenda with a fresh (Doom/Spacemacs/vanilla)-Emacs install and be productive from the get go. That's what I did. Then, you add things whenever you feel like it. You may never feel like it, the default is already very powerful, and I don't have a lot of customization around agendas, etc. in my configuration. The only thing I actually do is set where my org mode files live, set a couple of keybindings, and add one agenda view. That's it. I've been using that same setup for years now. The rest of my config is merely making it a bit prettier, because default Emacs is somewhat ugly.
- yur3i__ 6y ago
  Maybe my problem is I don't do complex enough work to warrent a tool like this (I'm still a BSc student). I do use emacs for almost everything already but I don't use anything for organization really because it just seems like a really complex way of just setting a reminder somewhere
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    I use org mode and my work is fairly simple. Never underestimate the power of being able to go back to your thought process on something you did 1, 5, or even 10 years ago.
nojito 6y ago
"organizational tools" Are a great business idea for this very purpose because it gives people the illusion that they are getting organized --> productive.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

enitihas 6y ago

I was a big fan of org mode, and I still think nothing beats it for free form note taking. But if your use cases are very simple todo tracking, you might want to try OmniFocus. I have bene using OmniFocus and found a very easy to use replacement. It doesn't match the flexibility of org mode but gets the job done.

dijit 6y ago
The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves. For context I have lost files because the old version of the software which could read the formats would not run on my operating system, and purchasing a new license for the updated version was no guarantee that it would work either as the format had changed. Yes, this is a stupid qualm to have when Excel/Word exists, but in those cases the alternative is not easily digestible plain text documents. The case for making things more proprietary and costly should come with serious considerations. Especially at $10/mo. That's more than I pay for Netflix. (FD: I'm not an org-mode or emacs user, and this was written on a Mac) Information on the '.ofocus' file format here: https://github.com/tomzx/ofocus-format https://github.com/tomzx/ofocus-format
- danieldk 6y ago
  The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves. I am not an OmniFocus user, recent versions of OmniFocus can export data to the TaskPaper format (which is just plain text) or to a CSV file.
  - dijit 6y ago
    That is not the native format, therefore it doesn't really matter. You _can_ export Excel documents as CSV too.
- 6y ago

tomcooks 6y ago

Can I get a quick rundown on why Org Mode is better (easier/faster/more organized/whatever you prefer) than a ~/TODO.md file? I use this format: ``` ## yyyy-mm-dd name of the homework - for tasks that have to be done ! for tasks that contain a warning, careful, beware > for tasks I am waiting for others to give me output about ? for tasks I am not sure about v for tasks I've completed x for tasks i won't do, WONTFIX ``` so, for example, today i'd have: ``` ## 2020-05-25 orgmode > ask about orgmode on hn v rant on hn about my own flatfile task management x install emacs ? look if orgmode can be tested on vi ```

michaericalribo 6y ago
In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. The markup is just markdown, modulo a few conventions. The power of org mode is manipulating the data / text / content you have written and marked up
- rgoulter 6y ago
  > In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. As one example of this, org mode makes it easy to collapse/expand the content of a task.
  - michaericalribo 6y ago
    That’s a good point—the software provides new types of UI, too! I had been thinking about rearranging text and org-capture, but you’re right that another excellent feature is the ability to view and interact with text fluidly and easily
chapium 6y ago
Org-mode does nifty things like letting you plop a date tag anywhere and indexing it for reminders later, like 5 day outlook. Its basically text only onenote.

glxxyz 6y ago

This is what procrastination looks like.

contravariant 6y ago
Nicely organized procrastination though.

ropeladder 6y ago

<rant>I've been trying out orgzly as a note dump replacement for Trello on mobile. It works ok but I tried setting up actual emacs the other day in order to convert the Trello json output to .org, and the experience was horrible. I couldn't install plugins because I needed to install a plug-in manager, and I couldn't install that because I needed to install another plugin or change some obscure GPG setting. On top of this you have to learn not only a whole new set of overly complicated commands but new vocabulary as well. I finally did get it working but oof. I'll stick with vim.

RaycatRakittra 6y ago
Sounds like you got an amalgam of bad first impressions. Sorry to hear that! So, something that helped me get pass that inertia was learning where init.el resided and how it is loaded. After I read about that, installing a package manager that's not constrained to the minibuffer was a 3-4 line endeavour (use-package). Save, reload. After that, you might get a notification of Emacs warning you about trusting an unknown source. (I always accept here.) After that, it was a matter of using M-x use-package and installing packages that I remembered from Spacemacs: which-key, restart-emacs, swiper/counsel/ivy, and hydra were enough to get me up and running. Regarding the overly complicated commands, I agree that they're a bit lengthy but you are able to change the ergonomics of your keybindings at will. My config is heavily inspired by evil-leader and I put a lot of functionality behind "C-;". So, "C-; f p f" will open a search dialog for all of the files in the current VCS repo. This might be lengthy for some but it feels right to me. I like that about Emacs. Sorry for the rambling! If you ever decide to try it out again, feel free to message me and I'll help where I can.

pkalinowski 6y ago

It looks insanely complicated for no reason. Why do such super organisation, where you have great search at your disposal? I just have everything inside Notes folder with subfolders if any project is getting bigger. Anytime I want to look for something, I just do global text search for the whole Notes folder.

sinkasapa 6y ago
I suppose this is for the same reason that people structure databases. There are often non-trivial relationships between different types of information that are useful to keep track of. Citations and links are useful features for note taking.
rgoulter 6y ago
Notes and reference material benefits from good search tooling. But tasks or todo lists benefit from being well-organised.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Because "great search" is not even close to good enough and handles only a fraction of the features. This is like saying that excel is insanely complicated for no reason, when pen and paper exist. If this is all you need, great, but if it is not then the comparison does not even make sense.
taylorlunt 6y ago
There are lots of features I don't use in org. In fact, in the beginning I only used the most basic feature of keeping a foldable hierarchical text file of notes, which is basically the same thing as your Notes files, but with some nice structure editing and folding keybindings built in. But I have been slowly integrating org features into my system when I think they would be useful to me. First I started scheduling things. With org, you can schedule items and have them show up in your agenda regardless of what org file they are in. Org agenda gives you an outline of your week, and your current day, and it says how many days you have left until certain items are due. This has replaced my calendar, and feels superior to a calendar to me. Then I started using org-drill, which lets you drill org notes, emulating the spaced-repetition behavior of Anki. You could just use Anki, but it's nice to have all of your personal information management in one place, and have it editable from your text editor. I've also started using hyperlinks to make links between my org files and also to any other file on my computer, to web URLs, to executing a script, to mailto links... This has been helpful. I still don't use plenty of features, like the literate programming stuff, tables, tags, capture, etc. But I don't need to. They're there for me if I feel they would be helpful. But they're invisible to me otherwise. Org isn't "insanely complicated" because it's mostly just a text file, and the features are there for you to use if you need them, but there's no cluttered UI that actually adds any complexity.

madballster 6y ago

I do all my research, note-taking and idea brainstorming in org-mode. Couldn't live without it.

michaericalribo 6y ago

Org mode is a fun note taking tool built on top of emacs, and it’s great that it works so well for some people. But, in my experience, the hard lock-in to emacs makes it impossible to make a central part of my workflow. Plus, org mode encourages so much planning to be productive and customization that I end up without any time to get any real work done

tams 6y ago

The key to using org-mode effectively is ignoring most of the features and using only a tiny subset that you actually need. You aren't going to look like a wizard, but you are also not going to need to maintain anything ever. These kinds of cookbooks are nice to have around, but it's best to treat them as references, not guides.

karlicoss 6y ago
In remember seeing this exact document five years ago and being completely overwhelmed. Now, looking at this, all of these features make sense to me, but I'm far from using all of them. Agree it's more of a kitchensink reference.

dpweb 6y ago

Favorite all time personal productivity tool: ClipX (last version 15 years ago). Besides being an clipboard manager, you can save all clipboards to a text file. I have a file running 3 years and just text search it to find old information.

nanna 6y ago

Having been using Emacs and org-mode for about 4 years now, I've been thinking a big mistake has been made in how the system is pitched. It's always something about it being 'plain text', which makes non-Emacs users say 'Why would I switch from my plain text editor? Or 'Why would I switch from a flashy GUI webapp version of this particular feature?' Emacs can't be appreciated for any one feature, even org mode, powerful as that is. You have to take the entire system and all it's possibilities into account. Org mode is particularly special because it integrates so many of Emacs' features, from literate programming to keeping a Wiki, to scheduling, to keeping a diary, to file browsing, to accounting, to emailing, to so much more. But to try to judge one package like org mode is a bit like judging a car by the quality of its seats. The only thing I've experienced which compares to this is, perversely, the Office 365 suite. Yes, of course, all the functions are completely different and I'm not making a like-for-like functionality comparison. But in Office365 an email client (Outlook) is integrated with a team's documents (via Sharepoint), chats (via Teams), calendar, etc, etc. The value of Office365 isn't in any one app, it's their integration. It's the entire system. Obviously the Emacs system has a completely different and opposing design philosophy to Office365's. It's ground-up, fully-extendable, initially demanding, text based, exportable, self-hosted, free, and so on. All of which increasingly goes against the grain of the trajectory of software today. However for those who give it the time and effort, it really does offer to organise your life, and yes, in plain text.

nanna 6y ago
Another difference between emacs and Office 365. The code and functionality of both are also sustained by an ecosystem. For Office 365 that ecosystem is by and large constituted by the paid labour of workers employed by Microsoft, together with a minor subset of plugin contributors for certain applications. For Emacs, the ecosystem includes everyone who adopts the use of emacs. In other words, to Microsoft's system you are a customer. Microsoft may choose to adapt their system to your use case if you are lucky enough to represent a big enough user or use case. To emacs you are part of the very ecology which sustains the whole system. That's where the sense of empowerment and 'freedom' (I hate the term) comes from.
tangue 6y ago
That's one of he best pitch for Emacs I've ever read. I wish GNU were able to communicate that.

madballster 6y ago

I see a lot of comments arguing that it's not "worth it" to spend dozens of hours to "get into org-mode" when there are "intuitive tools" such as Evernote or Trello or Todoist etc. What some are missing is the fact that low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage. After (!) one has sunk thousands of hours into them. I used to keep my academic notes in Evernote and it turned into hell after about 2,000 notes and a few years of work. I couldn't find things when I needed them, it didn't support a non-linear mode of work. It became my personal black hole that swallowed up information but never gave it back. With org-mode I have created my very own filing and research system. After years of using it and thousands of articles I find things. Quickly. Now, with org-roam, I create hubs of knowledge and ideas that I can come back to at a later point without worrying about linearity or chronology. No longer do I need to know where things are. I know what ideas are in there. If I don't like a certain workflow, I can grow, develop or change my filing and note-taking system as I see fit. In my opinion, org-mode eliminates the risk of hitting any sort of barrier after years of sunk costs.

purerandomness 6y ago
Also, people forget that their favourite SaaS-du-jour probably won't be around after their "Incredible Journey" ends and there won't be a migration path, or it's going to cost too many hours to be worth it. Emacs will be here for us in the next decades, even well after our career ends, and then some.
- nextos 6y ago
  Besides, Org is not complicated. It has lots of features, but at its core it's just a plain text outliner with hyperlinks, keywords and timestamps. Org is like Common Lisp in many ways. It offers you lots of paradigms to build your own workflows, but you don't need to use or understand them initially. An it might suffer from the same PR problem Emacs has. Manuals, tutorials and guides throw all features at once without focussing on core concepts first. And it's overwhelming for newcomers.
  - kohtatsu 6y ago

xvilka 6y ago

There is orgmode plugin also for Vim[1]. [1] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

mcshicks 6y ago

I've been an org mode user since 2012. When I started using it, I was learning emacs at the same time, really didn't know anything about lisp. But I had used a lot of other organizational systems going back to palm pilot days, I knew what I wanted. This website gave me everything I needed and I was able to start adding pieces one at time to my config file to get them working. It's a big part of my setup and I'm really grateful for the person who put it up that they did it (and kept it up to date) for a long time.

AlexAffe 6y ago

As many in here mention, org-mode has a few very good features but is much too complicated to get into. My absolute favorite for self organization is Joplin: - self hosted - markdown - file attachments - cross device - lean interface - encryption Those are my core must haves, but there is much more which really motivated me getting into Joplin.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I surprised myself when I stopped using org-mode when I "retired" (ha!) March 2019. At my last on-site job, I had to juggle managing a small deep learning team, work on 100+ US patents, and all of my own technical work and research. Org-mode was perfect to keep everything organized. Now, I rely heavily on Apple Notes (this required discovering a little app that exports the notes for backup, and also realizing that I can use the web apps in iCloud.com on my Linux laptop). This reliance on Notes may change however as just recently I have developed the habit of keeping a Mosh (like SSH) session always open between my iPhone and iPad to my remote server, with appropriate tmux setups for each device. I was just thinking yesterday about how I could now always keep a tmux pane open to emacs+org-mode.

mr_spothawk 6y ago
can you recommend any ways for me (a low-mid developer trying to improve my skills with e.g. tmux & mosh) to get access to the brains of mature/retiring expert level engineers? mostly i'm interested in learning these sorts of productivity patterns. unfortunately, i don't work closely with any developers. i took a job a couple years ago in order to apprentice under a linux guru, but unfortunately he left the company 2 days before i started. i was fortunate to learn a lot from the remaining team before the company shuttered 8 months later.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  If you know what specific skill you want/need to pick up (e.g., "learn to use Mosh to effectively do development on remote servers") that can be a simple web search for tutorials. I guess that the real issue is discovering what skills you don't even know about. Where ever you work, it is fair game to ask people there for advice.
bwbmr 6y ago
Big mosh user here myself. How do you deal with tmux limiting window size to the lowest common denominator device? I usually run a little bash script manually to disconnect other tmux sessions whenever I switch devices, which gets annoying. Also which app for Apple Notes exports do you use?

albmoriconi 6y ago

I can feel this deeply because even though I'm an Emacs user, and thoroughly like the Emacs + Org experience, I was never able to keep a working system organized with Org mode. I ended up using OmniFocus for my tasks and Notion for "information and note storing"; they have great, built-in support for the things I need to do and I spend very little time managing them and keeping them in order, so they simply do "what I need them for". They also play nice with mobile devices, images and external documents, and integrate with my Outlook calendar (something I am forced to use for work). I have no doubt that a proficient Emacs user could create something similar, even better, using only Org mode; I don't use third party configurations and keep mine to one hundred lines, more or less; when things get more complicated, I notice that I mostly end up in a game of min/maxing without getting the same amount of "useful" that I get from other systems. The big problem is that, the way I'm running now, I don't own my data; OmniFocus worries me particularly because, as already said in other comments, it's Apple-only. Notion worries me too: I wish them all the best, but what happens if they go out of business? Sure, I can export everything in plain text, but the structure of my data would be pretty hard to recreate in another system. Even though configuration + Org files amount to some amount of complexity, I can have trust that their format is long lived and that they are stored where I decide. This is a sort of "peace of mind" I can relate with, and that I have somehow lost when I decided to use these other systems; however I am infinitely more satisfied with two systems that do "exactly what I want"; I hope to find a way to reconcile these ends sometimes, but for the moment Org mode is "only" my outlining tool of choice.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

iixmiix 6y ago

nice! thx, that is exactly what I need right now! Since remote work happened, I use a big single org file, with headers and a date here or there. Now I have the opportunity to fix this and a guide to how.

dpbriggs 6y ago

Recent CS graduate here. Used org-mode for every assignment and report. Used it at every internship. Will be using it in my full-time work. Use it at work to automate pull-request bureaucracy and notes. Use it for design notes and render into other formats. It's the highest productivity format I have ever encountered, and we haven't even touched org-agenda.

throwaway286 6y ago
How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests? Do you make the pull request inside emacs? Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch? Or something else?
- dpbriggs 6y ago
  Preface: I like very detailed pull-requests. For me this includes JIRA information and implementation notes. Most of my recent work has been backend API stuff, and org-babel/restclient [0] lets me do fast test-driven-development in the same file. These inputs / outputs are included in the PR render so it's easy to see what the API is doing. > How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests? I have a script called 'new_jira $JIRA_NUMBER' which pulls relevant JIRA information from the REST API and generates an org-mode file. I do my work and list implementation details, gotchas, and generally narrate work done. Details are light for easy tickets, and heavy on complex ones. Finally, render it as markdown and copy/paste in the GitHub PR field. I also include tips / tricks if it's not appropriate to comment directly in the code base. I come back and search for these later (knowledge base). > Do you make the pull request inside emacs? I've usually faced admin issues trying to get the necessary tokens to make PRs in emacs. Just render, copy & paste in the PR title/description field. > Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch? That's right. All work relevant to a particular ticket is captured in a single org-mode file. I keep my git history clean and well documented so it's not necessary to use these files to understand commit history though. > Or something else? For work unrelated to the JIRA flow (e.g. security bug hunting) I use org-mode to track the entire narrative and use org-babel to inline code necessary for the exploit. This makes security reporting easy as I just render as PDF and shoot it off to the security people. [0] https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

Syzygies 6y ago

Starting in 2005, I've been keeping dated text files in a Log folder, organized by year and month. Anytime I need digital "scrap paper" I make sure I keep it. If I need to save files, I open instead a dated log folder. There's a critical optimization problem here the young often get wrong. One needs to "Huffman code" the work put into organizing on entry, versus the work later in retrieving. For example, I save physical receipts into four rotating bins by quarter, then I vacuum pack the old receipts and stash them in the garage. Occasionally I save hundreds of dollars by proving I shipped something (and that would be a receipt I probably scanned) but any more work than this on entry would be a mistake. It's the complete lack of organizational structure, other than date, that make my log files so useful. I instead get good at including keywords, always asking how I would find this later. I never have to wonder whether I filed this under "garden" or "tomatoes", resorting to a system-wide search. And this system has survived many editor migrations. I agree with the arguments not to use a commercial system. That's like putting an aspirational cookbook on your coffee table. Org Mode is also too structured on entry to be optimal for me.

ramraj07 6y ago
Regarding physical hoarding of bills, you should consider investing in a scansnap scanner - you can throw paper that's barely organized into a pile and it'll scan both sides into fully ocr'ed beautifully corrected duplex PDFs. Can't imagine life without it anymore!
ebertucc 6y ago
> It's the complete lack of organizational structure, other than date, that make my log files so useful. A thread here about a week ago on bookmark management reinforced this idea for me.[1] When it comes to general knowledge management, complex, predefined taxonomies don't feel worth the overhead when retrieval is so often ad hoc and messy. Grepping about in log files for keywords usually does the trick. Tags are nice, but like you say, getting good at including searchable keywords performs a similar function. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228861

M2Ys4U 6y ago

I tried to use Org Mode at work last year, to take meeting notes, track time spent on the 12 different projects I have to chip in to and to organise my calendar. It was okay, but I didn't (and still don't) use Emacs for anything else. I get the impression that unless you live your life entirely in Emacs then it's just not worth it.

Altheasy 6y ago

No thanks

olivierestsage 6y ago

YMMV, but Emacs and Org Mode have made my life finally seem manageable after basically a lifetime of struggling to keep track of everything. If that sounds like you, it might be worth your time to try.

mr_spothawk 6y ago
would you be willing to put up a few screenshare videos describing your workflow?

amake 6y ago

I take all my work notes in org-mode and had a hard time viewing them on my iPad, so I made a cross-platform mobile reader app: https://orgro.org https://orgro.org (It's FOSS but available on the App Store and Google Play for convenience. It will be available on F-Droid soon as well.)

tra3 6y ago
It'd be great if there's was a trial option.
- amake 6y ago
  I wish the stores let you do that easily :( If you're on Android then you can wait for F-Droid, or you can get an automatic refund from Google Play if you uninstall it shortly after purchase. Otherwise you can always build and install from source, since it's FOSS.

jypepin 6y ago

am I bad for not having a personal notes system or even not taking notes about anything? I feel like any time I take notes on something, I rarely (read, _never_) go back to them, mostly because I don't care or just forgot I took those notes.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Org mode has always been too flexible for me. The lack of constraints on what could be done made it very hard to actually create a system that was reliable for me. Also, I stopped using Emacs as my daily driver when I started working in Java professionally.

souterrain 6y ago

Former org-mode user here. One of the anti-features of emacs/org-mode for certain people, particularly those who get obsessed with tooling, travel down technology rabbitholes, and are subject to crippling bouts of procrastination, is the extensibility and the common paradigm that one should do everything in emacs. Ultimately, I switched to using specific tools for specific tasks. For example, I found Zotero a much better way of managing research, while still allowing export to BibTeX. I still can organize in plain text, I just avoid getting tripped up with endless tool maintenance and customization.

tkuraku 6y ago

I like the idea of Org Mode, but for me it is just a painful to use. Vscode with the "Markdown All in One" does everything I could possibly need. It is still plain text and it should be portable to any tool that can display markdown files. The biggest draw is the keyboard shortcuts are far less complicated and more ergonomic (though perhaps less powerful than emacs, but that is fine with me). edit: Also interestingly Vscode feels much more cross platform for me. I have tried to get Emacs running on windows and it wasn't a good experience.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Yeah, unfortunately, while Emacs on Windows works, it kind of feels like a fish pulled out of the water. What I do when I work on Windows machines is build and launch Emacs under WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), and use an X Server on the Windows side (VcXsrv) to get a GUI window.

clircle 6y ago

A very simple org-mode workflow that I use to great effect is to just use org-capture and org-agenda and basically ignore all the other features.

ericsoderstrom 6y ago

As a vim user, I've wanted to learn org mode for years. I kept thinking I had to start by learning vanilla emacs and then progress to org mode. Recently I've tried starting with doom emacs which emulates the vim keybinds and found it to be much easier going. I'd recommend it to any vim users wanting to get in to org mode.

kmstout 6y ago

I've been playing with org-mode as the basis for a literate programming workflow. So far, the results have been nice, though tangling is slow. (For that, I wrote little tool to do the tangling for me, including following the noweb references. Combined with inotifywait, this gives me tangle-on-save.) The most detailed org LP example I have is at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/master/2020/05/05/index.org https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reindeereffect/reindeereff... the tangled products are at https://github.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/tree/master/2020/05/05 https://github.com/reindeereffect/reindeereffect.github.io/t... and the "woven" HTML is at https://reindeereffect.github.io/2020/05/05/index.html https://reindeereffect.github.io/2020/05/05/index.html Sometime in the near future I'll split the LP tools off from the rest of my configuration so that others can use them more easily, if they're so inclined.

christiansakai 6y ago

I use vim, so what is my alternative? Not gonna learn emacs for the sake of org mode.

quazar 6y ago
You should try. I also was a loyal vim user, but OrgMode was so wonderful I switched to two-editor solution. Emacs for OrgMode and vim for everything else. Remember, that you don't actually have to learn Emacs, like you had to learn vim to use it. It's just an ordinary text-editor, no huge upfront time investment is needed, especially if all you are after is OrgMode.
- christiansakai 6y ago
  Okay, I'll consider giving it a try!
noidesto 6y ago
Doom emacs

sudhirkhanger 6y ago

Is there something that could sync text/org files as seamlessly as Evernote/Google Keep does?

noidesto 6y ago
Syncthing
- sudhirkhanger 6y ago
  Don't two devices have to be online at the same time?

streb-lo 6y ago

For people who just want a very simple CLI to manage tasks/todos I would definitely recommend task warrior: https://taskwarrior.org/ https://taskwarrior.org/

amphitheatre 6y ago

I love the concepts and workflow that org-mode, as well at surrounding extensions, promote. What I rue, however, is how tightly it is married to Emacs. vim extensions for it aren't up to the same level yet, and the mobile apps for org-mode are quite lacking, after trying them. It just seems like it has so much promise, and people have done a lot of interesting things with it, but it's clouded behind this learning curve and toolchain.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

My life is now organized just in time to die of old age learning this system. I'm the most organized dead-guy I guess. When my scroll bar turns into a tiny square in the top right of the window for something as trivial as a note-taking system I nope right out of there.

jeromenerf 6y ago
Org is not a note taking system. It’s an emacs app that can do a lot and that you can use and tweak as you want. Note taking, todo list, calendar, scientific notebook, literate programming, bibliography, ... It allows to mix static (what you insert) and dynamic (code execution, graph generation, tables, images, spreadsheets). The author logged how he customized his setup to do whatever he needed and shared it. I found great tips there. I fail to understand the negativity in the comments for such hacker friendly system and submission.
- gjvc 6y ago
  > I fail to understand the negativity in the comments for such hacker friendly system and submission. One would have thought that a programmable editor (using LISP, no less) would be held in high regard by the majority of people on here. Just goes to show that you can't please all of the people all of the time.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    > Just goes to show that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Maybe these people are hackers who hack as-in "hacksaw", to punch a hole quickly. There is no sense of urgency in the french synonyms etymology.

Darkstryder 6y ago

The first section of this article is called "How To Use This Document" and it immediately reminded me of: https://xkcd.com/1343/ https://xkcd.com/1343/

its-tony 6y ago

It's interesting, never used it although it looks like it would require more time than it could actually save. The very best products I've encountered are the exact opposite, so easy to use that they feel like they're essentially useless. Organising life is an abstract monster that no one has ever gotten even close solving it. The question of how do make the most out of our time in our short and unpredictable lifetimes has become somewhat intriguing and boggling to me. Over the years I've been playing around with a architecture of a tool that would take a crack at this ambiguous challenge. If someone's interested in trying out an early version, feel free to leave your email here. https://forms.gle/tqpuNpfdpdB3DZLi9 https://forms.gle/tqpuNpfdpdB3DZLi9.

gexla 6y ago

Lots of comments about Org mode being complicated. This link shouldn't be representative. This is the culmination of an iterative effort over years. I don't know the history behind it and not a hardcore user. But I would suggest start out with basics and building slow. Bring in what's useful and learn that well before moving on to other things. I would not drink in this entire doc all at once.

cachestash 6y ago

Yet another org mode will change your life post.

shanemhansen 6y ago

I love org mode and use it every day. It's killer misfeature for me is I can't collaborate on wikis or Google docs with org mode. I've seen a great org mode webapp here, but Google drive permissions means you are forced to grant the webapp read/write to everything (not just a folder or mimetype). In spite of that I still use it because I've never seen anything like it in terms of functionality.

ftwynn 6y ago

So I started taking a course recently based on an HN post about putting everything in org-mode: https://tasshin.com/blog/implementing-a-second-brain-in-emacs-and-org-mode/ https://tasshin.com/blog/implementing-a-second-brain-in-emac... What I found pretty quickly was that org-mode is great for organizing things in emacs. BUT if you ingest any meaningful amount of ideas from outside of emacs, it gets orders of magnitude more difficult to put your "whole life" in there. Emacs was built in a pre-web, pre-mobile world, and it's a frustrating experience to try and wire those up to emacs. There are some helper packages, to be sure, but tools like Evernote have seamless capture built across all the platforms without any effort on my part. I found once I'd decided to switch from using org-mode to using Evernote as my life organizing destination a whole class of challenges simply disappared. In my opinion, we should use the right tool for the job. Org-mode, by the nature of living in emacs land, is very difficult to actually get you whole life into, even if it would be nice to organize once you did so.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

One very special use-case for org-mode I have in "my life" is literate programming. I've not used any other tool, that can do this as well as org-mode. (1) I can export to many formats. (2) I can choose what to code export (source blocks). (3) I can choose what code to run on export. (4) I can give names to source blocks and then link to them in other source blocks, basically building a code dependency tree with them, allowing me to focus on one aspect at a time. (5) I can link to other source blocks out of order. (6) I can specify how the output should be put back into my document. (7) I get syntax highlighting for any language, that is usually highlighted in my Emacs. (8) I can use multiple (programming) languages. For example I could output a data table and then have another source block using GNU Plot to make a nice diagram. (9) I can write explanations next to the source blocks in a lot of detail. There is probably more, that does not come to mind just right now. Then there are some git hosts (notabug), which can render org-mode files like the usual hosts render markdown files (readme.md). So when you upload into git, you get instant readability in a rendered version, plus possibly syntax highlighting on the website. That is only one aspect where org-mode really shines. I find it also indispensable for to-do lists. Using shortcuts to check or uncheck items and recalculating done/to-do count or percentages in a higher level of the to-do list. One can prioritize headings and use tagging, to enable later filtering of headings and narrowing down visible content. One can also render Latex formulas inline for preview. If you need only standard document classes, you can go ahead and output to latex. Or you can create your own document class in your init.el file and customize everything as you would in writing Latex yourself, only that you get the benefit of writing org-mode instead. Much more focus on the content. And then of course everything is plain text, which makes this even better and easy to manage in version control. I just love org-mode! For me, easily one of the huge selling points for Emacs. The only other easy to use plain text format, that could get close was reStructuredText for me. Unfortunately there are few good reStructuredText parsers in many programming languages.

brnt 6y ago

It's not the same, but I'm using a QOwnNotes based setup. It does document-tocs, images, and a git versioned history if you wish, and a freeform fs layout for your notes which are saved as plain markdown. If emacs is what's stopping you from using orgmode, QOwnNotes may be something for you.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago

does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking between notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but org-mode is too heavy for my purposes.