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Every time I explore one of these my final impression is essentially trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs. I understand that emacs is a big ask for someo

Every time I explore one of these my final impression is essentially trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs. I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn, but so far none of them can offer a similar experience out of the box.

mmargerum 4y ago
Exactly my thought. What I need though is a web front end to search and view my org files when I don't have emacs available to me. I have client laptops that will only let me access browser apps.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  A web front-end is overkill -- Emacs users can use any completion framework (ivy, icomplete, vertico) with fdfind / ripgrep to get extremely powerful instantaneous search. Plus, there's no way any org features other than the baseline few are supported.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    I think the problem many users are looking for is a way to access emacs org mode and TODO entries on the phone.
    - terminal_d 4y ago
      Can't speak to that because I don't understand this use-case, but AFAIK it should be possible to modify an org agenda as long as emacs is running somewhere. It could write the current agenda to a file (in a s3 bucket, for example) with the function org-agenda-write, and the application on a phone could read the agenda and "push" the changes back, and an elisp function could handle modifying the actual agenda. Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted on the mailing lists as a POC or something.
      - nequo 4y ago
        Do you mean something like this? https://github.com/Gopiandcode/emacs-viewer https://github.com/Gopiandcode/emacs-viewer
        terminal_d 4y ago
        Oh, that's pretty similar.
terminal_d 4y ago
> I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn Developing a PWA for it (basically bikeshedding) is much more painful than learning Emacs. Right now, any vim user can jump into emacs with very little friction -- Doom Emacs comes fully configured with evil-mode ootb, and is easily customizable. I think the reason for the glut of personal kb apps is the relatively high interest of most "tech" people in these things. Unfortunately, most people bow out of their systems very often -- they either don't handle enough data or they give up on old data (or have it ineffectively categorized). This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there. There's some trying to use GPT-3, but honestly, I don't want my apps parsed by an internet-slurry model. When (if, really) it gets good enough, one wouldn't need to take notes in the first place.
- afarrell 4y ago
  The reason for the glut of these apps is that people have a drive to create.
  - terminal_d 4y ago
    It's a very damning thing to say, you know, if all that information management systems lead to is more information management systems.
- veidr 4y ago
  > This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there That take is just... wild. I've been following this space intently for two decades. The past couple years have seen revolutionary, fantastical advances. Obsidian 1.0 like just came out in September of this year! A huge milestone, but with Logseq chasing them and seeming only a months behind them (and more open source to boot). Even the slow, web-bound proprietary dinosaurs they are replacing — Notion, Roam, etc — are only a few years old, and in their time (which is now over) those represented huge advances over clunky Evernote, OneNote, and their ilk. All building on the shoulders of ancient, more limited tools like nvAlt, VoodooPad, Tiddlywiki, etc etc etc. We're right on the cusp of having a bunch of choices that can help manage all your notes, including your own and your collections of other people's, with images and video and audio and PDF etc, storing it all in non-proprietary open formats, on your own infrastructure (if you want, or cloud if you prefer), with familiar and easy GUI clients for all your devices, that stay synchronized whether you prefer to pay to make that easy or prefer to leverage the open standards and do it all yourself... and we're just getting started with the potential integrations and do-it-yourself add-ons that are enabled by the basis in common/open standards. I think has been and continues to be one of the most interesting spaces in all of computing. (Sure GPT-3 and friends are interesting, but emerging solutions in this space are also useful, and to a huge number of people to boot.)
lijogdfljk 4y ago
How does Org Mode handle Zettlekasten? Also one thing i like about these alternate options is they work on my phone. I regularly use Obsidian on my phone to lookup information, jot things down, etc. With that said i'm still looking (making.. maybe?) my perfect solution which is mostly just Selfhosted + Notes + Spaced Rep in the right UX.
- kkfx 4y ago
  I do not get your question: org-mode offer various ZK-alike implementation like zetteldesk on top of org-roam, in mere storage terms a zettel is a heading, real links between them allow to travel between notes. You can capture them in a timeline...
jrm4 4y ago
Just for sake of another person's experience: I did emacs org-mode for over a year and ended up abandoning it. For me, the issue was: I could absolutely see how powerful it could get, but not only was the learning curve wildly steep -- the way it does things is so different from most other programs that it would slow me down in those. I ended up falling back to a mix of things like zim-wiki, xbindkeys and a bunch of zenity/fzf based shell scripts to get what I wanted, while having something that played nice with everything else, interface wise.
chrisweekly 4y ago
IMHO if your "OOB" defn includes popular plugins w their default configs, Obsidian is at least comparable on features, and more accessible.
- ticviking 4y ago
  But then I can add popular emacs packages and my custom functions and get WAY ahead. I use a very basic emacs config. Emacs, org-roam, evil, evil-org, ivy, and which key. The most common way I do stuff is still M-x org-roam-find-node. The only time investment was learning the readline keybinds and doing the emacs tutorial. I do most of my coding in jetbrains with vim keys, and emacs is just a personal knowledge manager for me
ubermonkey 4y ago
I see you, and I don’t think you’re wrong, but I DO think that pursuing what Org does outside the world of emacs is worth doing. Asking someone to fiddle with lisp in order to have org’s functionality is a LOT. I feel like WAY more people would benefit from org if they didn’t have to use emacs to do it.
pydry 4y ago
>trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs I'd absolutely love to see more of this. Hate emacs but after picking up orgzly I'm addicted to orgmode.
kstrauser 4y ago
I love Emacs. It’s my daily driver IDE and I use it for everything involving text. That said, I can’t help it: I love shiny UIs, instant cloud syncing, and top-notch mobile apps. Plain Org, beorg, and Logseq make decent apps for reading content on the go, but they’re completely different from Emacs for editing and writing new content when I’m on my iPad. I have to learn at least two different apps for accessing the same data, and their feature sets aren’t identical in any case. If I could run Emacs natively on my iPad, I’d be all-in on org-mode. But I can’t, so I’m not.
TeddyDD 4y ago
There is no 100% spec compatible org-mode application for the mobile phones (because org mode does not have formal spec AFAIK). No amount of features will compensate that single drawback. End of story.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  It does have a spec now. It is called orgdown or so.
veidr 4y ago
I get that emacs and org-mode work for you, and probably a lot more people here on this website than elsewhere. And if that works for you, great! But, I'd wager that Silver Bullet (or Obsidian, Logseq, etc) is a far better tool for 95% of people (for the purpose of organizing ones class notes, book reviews, recipes, first drafts of articles/papers, self-directed learning, personal notes of meetings, diaries and journals, etm). Cross-platform (including phone) is probably a must-have for many. Immediate ease of use and lack of time spent not only learning, but configuring, is also important. A GUI following normal-people expected conventions, likewise. The overwhelming majority of people aren't programmers, and will never use emacs for anything. What emacs is good at is not what they need.
asoneth 4y ago
It is interesting that there are so many products that replicate Emacs features for people who don't use Emacs. ("X without Emacs" seems to be the open-source version of "Uber for Y".) It makes me think that if Emacs had a mode that was usable by novices out of the box and retained the same power it would take over the world.

mmargerum 4y ago

Exactly my thought. What I need though is a web front end to search and view my org files when I don't have emacs available to me. I have client laptops that will only let me access browser apps.

terminal_d 4y ago
A web front-end is overkill -- Emacs users can use any completion framework (ivy, icomplete, vertico) with fdfind / ripgrep to get extremely powerful instantaneous search. Plus, there's no way any org features other than the baseline few are supported.
- ticviking 4y ago
  I think the problem many users are looking for is a way to access emacs org mode and TODO entries on the phone.
  - terminal_d 4y ago
    Can't speak to that because I don't understand this use-case, but AFAIK it should be possible to modify an org agenda as long as emacs is running somewhere. It could write the current agenda to a file (in a s3 bucket, for example) with the function org-agenda-write, and the application on a phone could read the agenda and "push" the changes back, and an elisp function could handle modifying the actual agenda. Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted on the mailing lists as a POC or something.
    - nequo 4y ago
      Do you mean something like this? https://github.com/Gopiandcode/emacs-viewer https://github.com/Gopiandcode/emacs-viewer
      - terminal_d 4y ago
        Oh, that's pretty similar.

terminal_d 4y ago

> I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn Developing a PWA for it (basically bikeshedding) is much more painful than learning Emacs. Right now, any vim user can jump into emacs with very little friction -- Doom Emacs comes fully configured with evil-mode ootb, and is easily customizable. I think the reason for the glut of personal kb apps is the relatively high interest of most "tech" people in these things. Unfortunately, most people bow out of their systems very often -- they either don't handle enough data or they give up on old data (or have it ineffectively categorized). This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there. There's some trying to use GPT-3, but honestly, I don't want my apps parsed by an internet-slurry model. When (if, really) it gets good enough, one wouldn't need to take notes in the first place.

afarrell 4y ago
The reason for the glut of these apps is that people have a drive to create.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  It's a very damning thing to say, you know, if all that information management systems lead to is more information management systems.
veidr 4y ago
> This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there That take is just... wild. I've been following this space intently for two decades. The past couple years have seen revolutionary, fantastical advances. Obsidian 1.0 like just came out in September of this year! A huge milestone, but with Logseq chasing them and seeming only a months behind them (and more open source to boot). Even the slow, web-bound proprietary dinosaurs they are replacing — Notion, Roam, etc — are only a few years old, and in their time (which is now over) those represented huge advances over clunky Evernote, OneNote, and their ilk. All building on the shoulders of ancient, more limited tools like nvAlt, VoodooPad, Tiddlywiki, etc etc etc. We're right on the cusp of having a bunch of choices that can help manage all your notes, including your own and your collections of other people's, with images and video and audio and PDF etc, storing it all in non-proprietary open formats, on your own infrastructure (if you want, or cloud if you prefer), with familiar and easy GUI clients for all your devices, that stay synchronized whether you prefer to pay to make that easy or prefer to leverage the open standards and do it all yourself... and we're just getting started with the potential integrations and do-it-yourself add-ons that are enabled by the basis in common/open standards. I think has been and continues to be one of the most interesting spaces in all of computing. (Sure GPT-3 and friends are interesting, but emerging solutions in this space are also useful, and to a huge number of people to boot.)

lijogdfljk 4y ago

How does Org Mode handle Zettlekasten? Also one thing i like about these alternate options is they work on my phone. I regularly use Obsidian on my phone to lookup information, jot things down, etc. With that said i'm still looking (making.. maybe?) my perfect solution which is mostly just Selfhosted + Notes + Spaced Rep in the right UX.

kkfx 4y ago
I do not get your question: org-mode offer various ZK-alike implementation like zetteldesk on top of org-roam, in mere storage terms a zettel is a heading, real links between them allow to travel between notes. You can capture them in a timeline...

jrm4 4y ago

Just for sake of another person's experience: I did emacs org-mode for over a year and ended up abandoning it. For me, the issue was: I could absolutely see how powerful it could get, but not only was the learning curve wildly steep -- the way it does things is so different from most other programs that it would slow me down in those. I ended up falling back to a mix of things like zim-wiki, xbindkeys and a bunch of zenity/fzf based shell scripts to get what I wanted, while having something that played nice with everything else, interface wise.

chrisweekly 4y ago

IMHO if your "OOB" defn includes popular plugins w their default configs, Obsidian is at least comparable on features, and more accessible.

ticviking 4y ago
But then I can add popular emacs packages and my custom functions and get WAY ahead. I use a very basic emacs config. Emacs, org-roam, evil, evil-org, ivy, and which key. The most common way I do stuff is still M-x org-roam-find-node. The only time investment was learning the readline keybinds and doing the emacs tutorial. I do most of my coding in jetbrains with vim keys, and emacs is just a personal knowledge manager for me

ubermonkey 4y ago

I see you, and I don’t think you’re wrong, but I DO think that pursuing what Org does outside the world of emacs is worth doing. Asking someone to fiddle with lisp in order to have org’s functionality is a LOT. I feel like WAY more people would benefit from org if they didn’t have to use emacs to do it.

pydry 4y ago

>trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs I'd absolutely love to see more of this. Hate emacs but after picking up orgzly I'm addicted to orgmode.

kstrauser 4y ago

I love Emacs. It’s my daily driver IDE and I use it for everything involving text. That said, I can’t help it: I love shiny UIs, instant cloud syncing, and top-notch mobile apps. Plain Org, beorg, and Logseq make decent apps for reading content on the go, but they’re completely different from Emacs for editing and writing new content when I’m on my iPad. I have to learn at least two different apps for accessing the same data, and their feature sets aren’t identical in any case. If I could run Emacs natively on my iPad, I’d be all-in on org-mode. But I can’t, so I’m not.

TeddyDD 4y ago

There is no 100% spec compatible org-mode application for the mobile phones (because org mode does not have formal spec AFAIK). No amount of features will compensate that single drawback. End of story.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
It does have a spec now. It is called orgdown or so.

veidr 4y ago

I get that emacs and org-mode work for you, and probably a lot more people here on this website than elsewhere. And if that works for you, great! But, I'd wager that Silver Bullet (or Obsidian, Logseq, etc) is a far better tool for 95% of people (for the purpose of organizing ones class notes, book reviews, recipes, first drafts of articles/papers, self-directed learning, personal notes of meetings, diaries and journals, etm). Cross-platform (including phone) is probably a must-have for many. Immediate ease of use and lack of time spent not only learning, but configuring, is also important. A GUI following normal-people expected conventions, likewise. The overwhelming majority of people aren't programmers, and will never use emacs for anything. What emacs is good at is not what they need.

asoneth 4y ago

It is interesting that there are so many products that replicate Emacs features for people who don't use Emacs. ("X without Emacs" seems to be the open-source version of "Uber for Y".) It makes me think that if Emacs had a mode that was usable by novices out of the box and retained the same power it would take over the world.