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> but I feel desperately uncomfortable tying my notes to a piece of proprietary software Obsidian is proprietary, but Markdown isn’t. And there will always be

> but I feel desperately uncomfortable tying my notes to a piece of proprietary software Obsidian is proprietary, but Markdown isn’t. And there will always be Markdown personal wikis. I guarantee it. > What about if I want to style a real PDF in Asciidoc? Pandoc can export MD to PDF, HTML, .doc, anything. And you can style with CSS. But once you add spreadsheets and sketches into the mix, there’s basically no way around proprietary software.

smabie 6y ago
What about org-mode?
- randomchars 6y ago
  I had a look at it a few months ago, and my impression is that while it's very powerful, it's not for the average user. Heck, I work as a developer, spend a third of my day in the terminal, and I still wouldn't use it.
- dicytea 6y ago
  I recently moved from Workflowy to org-mode after being recommended by someone here and it has been a fantastic experience. Henrik's Doom Emacs distribution has really made the transition easy with its amazing out-of-the-box usability. There is one minor feature from Workflowy that I miss though, which is is the ability to "zoom" into a headline. You can narrow subtrees, but its level won't be adjusted. I tried to use some horizontal scroll hackery but couldn't get it to play well when you're switching buffers. I'm not sure how to save those narrowed buffers across sessions either. But in any case I definitely will stay with org-mode for quite a long time, it truly is a powerful piece of software.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  Org-mode is fantastic. Org files on Dropbox has been my standard note keeping and task management tool for close to a decade. But... it definitely has a learning curve as you simultaneously adapt your workflow to org and customize org to match your own desired workflow. For me, it is undoubtedly the best task and knowledge management tool I’ve ever used. But, I accepted a long time ago that the Emacs requirement is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
  - tehbeard 6y ago
    The learning curve and attitude of the old guard are what pushed me away from org mode. I loved the structure and the promise of being able to code/adapt workflows.. and being able to merge config and comments (literate programming, is it?) to document the few changes I managed to make. But learning Emacs around it, especially on a Windows system just isn't worth it :/
    - scruple 6y ago
      FWIW, there's a VS code extension. I haven't used it yet personally but I'd like to try it out eventually. I use vim-orgmode, otherwise, and it's been great. I should note that I've never used the original org-mode in emacs so I'm not sure if it's missing features or behaves differently, etc...
      - jabirali 6y ago
        I used Org for about 8 months last year, while I was testing out Spacemacs and Doom Emacs. My experience was that the Org-mode in Emacs was great. Especially how you could capture notes with backlinks from any Emacs context, and the Agenda view it generates. I went all-in on the ecosystem and wrote my mail in mu4e, for instance, which can integrate with Org-mode for writing HTML mail. Being able to add inline LaTeX equations and syntax-highlighted code snippets to such emails was gold. Having easily executable script snippets embedded in sysadmin notes was useful as well. As for other implementations of it — including vim-orgmode and every mobile app I tried — too many features were lacking or broken for it to be useful to me. In the end, I ended up going back to MarkDown when I left Emacs. The transition was quite painful; Pandoc helped a lot, but many things in my notes just broke during conversion, so I ended up just trashing most of my notes and spending an evening manually fixing the important ones. While Org is free and open source software, and it’s often repeated that “it’s just plain text”... I’d like to caution others that if you really use the features it has to offer, you’ll be locked into it just like with most proprietary formats. If you’re not completely sure you’ll use Emacs for the rest of your days, MarkDown is a safer option for a knowledge base you wish to keep over time.

smabie 6y ago

What about org-mode?

randomchars 6y ago
I had a look at it a few months ago, and my impression is that while it's very powerful, it's not for the average user. Heck, I work as a developer, spend a third of my day in the terminal, and I still wouldn't use it.
dicytea 6y ago
I recently moved from Workflowy to org-mode after being recommended by someone here and it has been a fantastic experience. Henrik's Doom Emacs distribution has really made the transition easy with its amazing out-of-the-box usability. There is one minor feature from Workflowy that I miss though, which is is the ability to "zoom" into a headline. You can narrow subtrees, but its level won't be adjusted. I tried to use some horizontal scroll hackery but couldn't get it to play well when you're switching buffers. I'm not sure how to save those narrowed buffers across sessions either. But in any case I definitely will stay with org-mode for quite a long time, it truly is a powerful piece of software.
tonyarkles 6y ago
Org-mode is fantastic. Org files on Dropbox has been my standard note keeping and task management tool for close to a decade. But... it definitely has a learning curve as you simultaneously adapt your workflow to org and customize org to match your own desired workflow. For me, it is undoubtedly the best task and knowledge management tool I’ve ever used. But, I accepted a long time ago that the Emacs requirement is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
- tehbeard 6y ago
  The learning curve and attitude of the old guard are what pushed me away from org mode. I loved the structure and the promise of being able to code/adapt workflows.. and being able to merge config and comments (literate programming, is it?) to document the few changes I managed to make. But learning Emacs around it, especially on a Windows system just isn't worth it :/
  - scruple 6y ago
    FWIW, there's a VS code extension. I haven't used it yet personally but I'd like to try it out eventually. I use vim-orgmode, otherwise, and it's been great. I should note that I've never used the original org-mode in emacs so I'm not sure if it's missing features or behaves differently, etc...
    - jabirali 6y ago
      I used Org for about 8 months last year, while I was testing out Spacemacs and Doom Emacs. My experience was that the Org-mode in Emacs was great. Especially how you could capture notes with backlinks from any Emacs context, and the Agenda view it generates. I went all-in on the ecosystem and wrote my mail in mu4e, for instance, which can integrate with Org-mode for writing HTML mail. Being able to add inline LaTeX equations and syntax-highlighted code snippets to such emails was gold. Having easily executable script snippets embedded in sysadmin notes was useful as well. As for other implementations of it — including vim-orgmode and every mobile app I tried — too many features were lacking or broken for it to be useful to me. In the end, I ended up going back to MarkDown when I left Emacs. The transition was quite painful; Pandoc helped a lot, but many things in my notes just broke during conversion, so I ended up just trashing most of my notes and spending an evening manually fixing the important ones. While Org is free and open source software, and it’s often repeated that “it’s just plain text”... I’d like to caution others that if you really use the features it has to offer, you’ll be locked into it just like with most proprietary formats. If you’re not completely sure you’ll use Emacs for the rest of your days, MarkDown is a safer option for a knowledge base you wish to keep over time.