11 ms·

Why and how I use Org Mode for my writing and more

164 points by adityaathalye 4y ago

ilovecaching 4y ago
I feel like org mode has almost become a joke it’s so oversold as the answer to all of life’s note taking problems. Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book and start presenting something they made in emacs… I think we all know using difficult tools tickles our programmer brains, but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?
- whalesalad 4y ago
  At the end of the day it’s just text. Not that different from markdown.
  - matrix12 4y ago
    All code is just text...
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      Big org-enthusiast here, but need to defend markdown. Plenty of folks have workflows that allow for inline execution in markdown. Babel is WAY more powerful, but markdown is fine for most code snippets.
      - matrix12 4y ago
        Markdown does not have the same overlap with org-mode. Many use it more like a Jupyter notebook. External work flows would not be considered part of Markdown per se. #+call: something(foo=bar, list=baz[,0]) this level of features just does not exist in Markdown. Just not what it was designed for.
        comfypotato 4y ago
        It just depends on what you’re trying to do. That could easily be done with Python and your favorite pip packages in a markdown code block, including the export (and importing a list of servers from another named markdown block). The benefits of org and babel are precisely that you can do it in whatever language you’ve written the rest of your literate programming document. As with most of these spectrums, markdown is less powerful and less complicated. Babel is one of the more confusing parts of org mode.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        paledot 4y ago
        I've never seen that done in CSS either. Why? Because that's not what CSS is for.
        matrix12 4y ago
        Well put. Markdown was not designed for the sorts of things Org-mode excels at.
        paledot 4y ago
        I (mis)interpreted the previous edit of your comment to be making exactly the opposite point.
        PurpleRamen 4y ago
        That example is part of the tooling, not the format. One can do the same with markdown, just write the tool for it. Obsidian.md, a popular markdown-environment for example, has many extensions doing stuff like this. Similar has VS Code.
- aeonik 4y ago
  It's still in beta, but Logseq supports org-mode formatted notes and runs on mobile platforms. I just sync it to my computers. You can do it yourself, but they also offer a service. Giving presentations from org mode is sweet, because you can execute any code or examples right from the slides. Management doesn't need to know what the underlying tech is. Having a Google Docs like platform would be very cool though. I'm surprised there isn't a secure P2P framework that can do this in a browser yet. Overleaf for Latex is cool, but something that could operate on any plain text file like Markdown, org-mode, or Yaml seems like a cool idea: I suppose VSCode kinda supports this idea at the moment with extensions and remote sessions.
- nvarsj 4y ago
  I guess the main advantage of org is Emacs itself - it's infinitely customizable and you can quickly hack automation and workflows. That doesn't exist in anything else as far as I know. If you just want to get stuff done, then something like Obsidian/Bear is really good. I actually swapped from many years of org-mode/roam to Obsidian myself about 6 months ago. My main reason was mobile integration like you mention. Obsidian sync is actually magic for me, a bit like Dropbox was for files.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  You made a big jump from note taking to presenting something from a pine book. (And I’m upset by your comment because it’s ignorant.) The article’s author is much further down the rabbit hole than most. People don’t use org mode because it tickles their brain; I don’t at least. I use it, just to take notes and manage tasks, because nothing else worked. I didn’t start using org mode planning to be a devotee. It was just another iteration of trying a note-taking and time management solution. Noteable other failed approaches include Todoist, an old school paper agenda and notebooks, or an attempt at using the iPhone’s built-in reminders and notes. Finally I’ve stuck with something. It’s a testament to how good org is that it delivered enough value while I was still picking up Emacs (for the purpose of using org) that I stuck with it. Contrary to your point about org mode getting negative comments from management, my notes and scheduling in an org doc have gotten praise from my managers during Zoom screen shares. It probably only evokes comments because it’s different (as opposed to particularly impressive) but they are definitely positive comments.
  - ithrow 4y ago
    What didn't work for you with Todoist? I'm using along side orgmode to quickly write down tasks on my phone.
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      Todoist was too much of its own ecosystem. (I use reminders for mobile task generation because Im comfortable in Apple’s ecosystem.) I wasn’t willing to learn the Todoist ecosystem with the risk of them changing it on a whim. (I’m also elisp-savvy so I can hack org mode to do exactly what I want, but that’s not the real issue/selling point.) It’s mostly not wanting to learn Todoist. I’d rather learn org mode knowing it’s mature. It drives me nuts when corps change the tools I use. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, you know? The risk of having a workflow-breaking change at an annoying time stresses me too much. Org mode changes at a much slower pace, and it’s much easier to use an older version of org while I adapt to the changes. There’s definitely nothing I do in org that can’t be done in Todoist. So theoretically Todoist would actually be better right now because of the mobile integration. I really like knowing that there’s a lot of room to grow with org mode, though. The workflow I aspire to is much more possible with org mode in the long run.
- radiator 4y ago
  I am not a user of orgmode, but: Managers would not have an opinion on the technical tools used for a presentation but would rather focus on important things, like clarity of message, tempo etc. But even if they do have an opinion, who cares?
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  > the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. Isn't it incredible that we've lost the ability, as a culture, to be on top of things without our pocket supercomputers? I don't need org mode on my phone. I dont need it on every device I own. I use org mode on my PC, and if I need any form of portability I can jot stuff down on a little piece of paper. Also, it's just text. We have countless services that can synchronize plain text files. Stop being whiney and pick one. > And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book Stop being so snotty. > and start presenting something they made in emacs… Yeah, I love an editor talk actually. Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    I’d never heard it put that way, that presenting in an editor is a strong no-bullshit signal, but how true is this! I had a professor who would teach from Emacs. She would store each section of the lecture in a register and paste as she went. (Watching her cursor flit around the buffer was actually strong encouragement for me to learn Emacs; it was nice to see how deftly it could be done without interrupting the flow of the lecture.) She had slides too, but obviously being in Emacs for these portions allowed interactive displays of code execution.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    > Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit. I think there are two kinds of bullshit relevant to meetings. One is spin or dishonesty, and the other is wasting people's time. Presenting with an editor can mean that what's about to be presented is honest and straight-forward, being grounded in the actual matter being discussed. Or it can mean that an engineer did zero prep for the meeting.
    - ithrow 4y ago
      Here is Rich Hickey doing a conference talk in orgmode ;) https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376 https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376
- mcshicks 4y ago
  Will I still be able to use Bear in 2033? I'm pretty sure I will still be able to use org mode and emacs. I agree org mode is not very good for collaboration but for that I think really things like Google keep and Google docs are much easier. I liked Wunderlist for that but alas it's gone.
  - CmdrLoskene 4y ago
    Wunderlist lives on, rebranded as Microsoft ToDo. As far as I can tell it's the exact same product, same feature set, etc. I think they made the transition unnecessarily clunky, but it's all there.
    - mcshicks 4y ago
      They closed the API's I used to sync with org mode.
      - CmdrLoskene 4y ago
        That does suck.
- xenodium 4y ago
  > Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com author here. Got plenty of happy iOS users doing those things.
  - adityaathalye 4y ago
    Thanks for making plainorg! I had listed it in my (hopefully incomplete) list of org-compatible tools in the post :) cf. the section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/index.html#but-seriously-emacs-winkwink-amirite https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...
    - xenodium 4y ago
      Thank you! =)
- mtts 4y ago
  You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones. I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools. This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use. Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs. This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.
  - HelloNurse 4y ago
    I'd rather say that phones aren't a good tool for Org-mode: they are very challenged at text input (no keys) and interfaces that avoid text with buttons, dragging, and other reliable gestures have the advantage of minimizing the text and quasi-text input that is the backbone of Org-mode and Emacs in general.
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      That's a long way of saying that you don't think of phones as a legitimate use case, but the rest of the world mostly disagrees with you. I've got ten years of orgmode buffers and I'm actively working to transition to Obsidian because the mobile story is so much better. With plugins like tasks, dataview, and outliner, I can do pretty much anything in Obsidian I could do in Org, and I can do it on my iPad without having to SSH to my Linode instance first. that's powerful.
      - ithrow 4y ago
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Never heard of Bear before, but it looks fundamentally unusable to me: limited platform support, possibly requiring serverside storage, charging for encryption, so if you're a free user don't expect notes to be private. I honestly find the concept of charging for note-taking software offensive. It's simple text, storage space is not a meaningful concern, serverside storage is fundamentally unnecessary and a security/privacy concern. This in my mind is just sloppy, overcomplicated, rent-seeking crap. It fails to meet even a single of the fairly rudimentary features i need for note-taking. Even a terrible text editor like nano would be more useful.
  - ithrow 4y ago
    Yeah just checked Bear out, it can't even fold headlines.
- JoeyBananas 4y ago
  There is a way to make slide decks using org mode and they actually look pretty professional. Go watch any David Wilson stream on YouTube.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    "System Crafters" is the Youtube channel referenced: https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists
- uludag 4y ago
  Just the thought of having some product manager trying to determine how a productivity app I use fits into their business objectives is reason enough to use something like org-mode. If there is a joke, I think it would be all the churn that "conventional" productivity apps have gone through. I used Evernote before switching to org-mode. The Evernote interface is completely unrecognizable and many vital features have been taken away. Not only that, I'm sure that in a few years it will change even more. Bear may have a more user-friendly product direction but they're still a business trying to make profit. Will the Bear service work in 10 years? Maybe. Will I be able to find a synchronization solution for my org-files? almost certainly.
- mik1998 4y ago
  Emacs for Android! It's a thing.
- throwanem 4y ago
  Back in 2017 I presented a new internal product to some VPs, most of whom I'd never met before, from org-mode source with slides via org-reveal. That remains one of the two or three most highly lauded presentations I've yet given, in a career now heading toward its 25th year. Org is easier to use and more capable now than it was then, and so is the tooling around it. That includes mobile; most, maybe all, of the apps linked from the article didn't exist back then, and there are several others not mentioned there. The community's grown significantly, too. So I'm not sure what point you think you're making here, but what I'm hearing is that you don't feel the need to have any familiarity with a technology before offhandedly dismissing it as meme nonsense apparently on the strength of a lot of people trying it and finding it good enough to be worth talking about. I wouldn't be comfortable with making such a showing of myself, but tastes differ, I suppose.
- rchaud 4y ago
  This comment reminds me of the negative reaction on the Nokia story a few days ago where they announced they'd be making phones with replaceable parts. "Who even needs a phone that doesn't have top-of-the-line imaging sensors! Are you going to take your engagement photos on that?" Completely missing the point.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Funny, I've authored probably half of my presentations at work since around 2016 using Org. Either export to Beamer or use org-reveal. No one cares. Of course, Powerpoint is superior in some ways, so I still use it. And if the manager needs a document he can make changes to, then I'll use Powerpoint. But these are exceptions, not the rule. > but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs? Only works on Apple? A non-starter for me. I type way better on a keyboard on my Linux machine, so any note taking app needs to work on it. And Org mode has been around for 20 years. I have notes I wrote almost 15 years ago in it. I want some guarantee that whatever tool I use will work 20 years from now. As a general rule, if you have to pay for a niche tool to use it, do not expect it to last two decades.
Lyngbakr 4y ago
I really like Org Mode, but I only need a tiny amount of its functionality. Emacs is my editor of choice anyway, so it's convenient to use Org Mode for my personal daily to-do list and backlog. And not even for a specific workflow system (e.g., GTD or whatever), just tasks with scheduled dates, deadlines, and some custom states. Agenda view is neat, too. That's plenty for me. It always impresses me though when I see how much others can do with it!
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  Likewise, re: "subset that I find useful". As I note in the post, I've never used it for TODOs etc. What keeps me in the org life is that whenever I've wanted to do X, orgmode itself and the wider ecosystem have answered "sure, here you go". And, personally, any learning curve + configuration overhead has been worth it because it composes as a unified system. My brain fares poorly if it has to jump between contexts for a single task (e.g. write lecture/talk notes, separately make a slide deck to present, separately make a live notebook / repo to run a demo, and then have to bounce between the three at run-time). I don't know... each to their own. This works for me, and I wish others tools that work for them. Life is too short for the annoyance borne of bad-fit personal tools. edit: clarify opening line
29athrowaway 4y ago
Placebo of the day, pick one at random: - Zettelkasten - Pomodoro - Org mode - 4 day work weeks
- seanw444 4y ago
  "It's all in your head bro. Keeping track of things the way you find most effective isn't important."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Let me add a note here to my zettelkasten orgmode pomodoro: "write clever reply on HN". That will do.
totalhack 4y ago
Wish there was a better org mode plugin in vs code.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  Yeah I recently had a teammate that wanted to collaborate with an org-roam I made public for my teammates. We evaluated the org mode plugins for vscode and even the very important use case of folding/unfolding headings was pretty bad. Went like this: teammate: vscode org plugins can't even fold/unfold with good bindings? teammate: What shortcuts do you use for folding/unfolding" me: tab and shift-tab teammate: just give me basic emacs So I setup a basic emacs config with context-menu-mode and recommended learning these shortcuts: - TAB/shift-tab for folding/unfolding - alt arrow keys for moving up/down and promoting/demoting - ctrl+enter for making a new heading and the guiding principle of "if you get confused go to the menu bar" or look at the ugly but helpful context-sensitive toolbar.
zkry 4y ago
I’ve tried so many productivity apps over and org-mode has been the only one that has stuck. I would say what sets it apart from other applications is its malleability. For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task. And the best part is that can be sure that I will be able to use org-mode for the rest of my career on the same terms.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task. This is screaming for a blog post entry. It's pretty cool.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    I agree. I have a similar account where I: - started using a pomodoro timer in emacs - noticed I wasn't using getting up for breaks - thought about how to fix it - added `(switch-to-buffer "~/reminder.txt")` which read "HEY! go on a break" to the "org-clock-out" hook that was called by the pomodoro timer In about 5-7 minutes I permantely fixed my issue thanks to the extensibility of emacs. I think a lot of these things don't get shared or posted because to the initiated they seem trivial. Or it's hard to know what level of experience should be assumed. I think "start with vanilla emacs and show how to do this one thing" might be a good place though.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      That's really cool. As for how to share in the blog post, I would not recommend starting with vanilla emacs - that would make for a really long blog post. Perhaps just vanilla org config (for people like me who don't use org clocking abilities). Simply post the problem you had and the code you wrote to fix it. Then post it to the Emacs Reddit and Mastodon (you'll get much more engagement from the latter if anyone on your instance/followers is an Emacs person).
adityaathalye 4y ago
My live demoscene version of using org looks like this (including demofails, which we don't worry about because we have probably already published the blog post version :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rickstanley 4y ago
Funny, I'm using Doom Emacs and I just tried Org Mode for the first time, for a simple note (M-x org-add-note); wrote the note and then finished with `C-c C-c`, I have no idea where it went! :) Love it when I push myself to explore a new tool. (The only clue that I have is that the command description says: "Add a note to the current entry".)
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  Welcome to the org life :) I don't use Doom, but it seems to have pre-configured location for the default orgmode file, which, of course you can change at will. ref: https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/modules/lang/org/#/configuration https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/modules/lang/org/#/configu...
  - rickstanley 4y ago
    Thanks! I'll try reading their manual (or follow some tutorial). For now, I'll be using Org-roam[0], seems to be much simpler [route] to add and find notes and it even comes with first class support for Doom (see "Using Doom Emacs" section)! - [0]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
yewenjie 4y ago
I know HN loves org-mode, and so I, but goddamn it, it is 2023 and there still no sane good-enough parser for org-mode?
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  I'd love an LSP-mode for org. But that may be difficult, because the formal grammar is quite vast. ref: A formal grammar for Org: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-04/msg00108.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-04/msg...
  - e3bc54b2 4y ago
    There is a tree-sitter parser in the works and neovim plugin is already using it. I think that makes more sense than full blown LSP.
    - adityaathalye 4y ago
      True, but why not wish for the whole kitchen sink? :) But on a more serious note, would you agree that an LSP server at par with Emacs Org Mode will validate the sufficiency of a standard grammar? That in turn will allow all sorts of apps to bloom. Right now everyone is having to roll their own for whatever subset of org they choose to support. And the fact of having to roll one's own is the limiting factor for feature support. Which isn't terrible, because partial compatibility can work just fine.
- natrys 4y ago
  There is though: https://github.com/tecosaur/Org.jl https://github.com/tecosaur/Org.jl
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Julia? Odd choice for that, but cool regardless.
lvh 4y ago
> Version-controlled and Highly Reproducible: I can go back to any saved version of any of the org files above, and reliably reproduce output for "distribution" (PDF, tex, HTML etc.). In other words, it is all highly reproducible. I love org-mode, I've lived the org-mode life, I ran a consultancy entirely off of it (time tracking, invoicing, task list management), I wrote a book in it... But boy, it was not reproducible. It is maybe salvageable because it's plaintext. It's definitely easy to version control. But tons of stuff, including e.g. details of how exports and tangling worked, broke between org versions. TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode.
- foobarian 4y ago
  I tried it for a while but ran into similar issues. Ultimately I settled on a plain text file with the only format being ISO dates alone on a line for date tags. Daily entries since 2010 :-)
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  Thanks for the experience report. May I include it in my post? Better still, if you've blogged about it, I will be happy to link across, in context. You are correct in ascribing my enthusiasm to a narrow use-case.
  - lvh 4y ago
    Sure! I didn't blog about it, but it is in the issue tracker of e.g. https://github.com/crypto101/book https://github.com/crypto101/book.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode. Maybe this is changing? I pretty heavily use noweb features for instance. Hm, it seems like you mean reproducability of export though which I don't use as much.
indymike 4y ago
The magic moment for me with org-mode was when I realized you could collect TODOs out of comments in code... in addition to calendar... in addition to "second brain" note taking... in addition to the fact the files were just text... and could be managed nicely with git... At this point, I've moved on from Emac for code editing, but I still use org-mode.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xwdv 4y ago
This blog would benefit from a bit more line spacing.
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  Thanks for the note. Please could you send me a screenshot (email in profile), and perhaps some detail on your device + os + browser combination? I've aimed for density, and proportions defined under a modular scale. As far as I've seen it appears to work as I want it to (my devices, friends' devices) --- body text lines are compact but not squashed. Ref: https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css line-height: var(--scale-l); font-size: var(--scale-l); I will think about it... there are some other typographic niggles I should like to fix. Maybe this will be my excuse :)
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Not sure but these serif fonts need to breathe more. This is an iPhone 14.
    - gnuj3 4y ago
      Agreed on that. I had to take a break from reading this post just because of how unreadable that blog UI is
abeppu 4y ago
Every so often I get into using org mode for a while, and the first day or so is always great. But, as with every similar tool in the space, I quickly find cases where the different features don't compose or interact well. For example, - org mode will fill out/align an ascii table if you start it and tab. When you change a cell, just tab, and everything aligns into a well-formed table again. Great! - org mode will let you type latex and then `C-c C-x C-l` to render those latex snippets in text. Lovely! - but the table logic is unaware of whether $latex-snippets$ have been rendered or not, so you can't see an aligned table whose cells contain latex snippets Yes, one could do the whole table in latex, but this is more verbose and more fragile if one is incrementally building out the table as one takes notes, and occasionally previewing to confirm it's not broken. Roughly, I think this illustrates a key tension where - if everything is pure text, then improving tools is 'easy' - but people don't actually want pure text for all uses; for some domains, dealing only with text requires some mental energy which can detract from the actual task of interest
- tra3 4y ago
  Absolutely agree, however the alternatives are lacking. What you get with org (and other plain text formats) is that conversion is easy. I typically do 80% of the my authoring in org, and then finalize the last 20% elsewhere. Is it perfect? No. But pragmatic.
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  Don't use org mode. As I said in another comment in this thread, the whole idea is just egregious yak shaving. Does org mode have semantic understanding of keywords and a language AI to record my tasks for me? Then it's doomed. Does it sync in the cloud and have world class security (only storing decryption keys at rest in specialized hardware, locally on a TPM like device)? Then it's doomed. Does it have beautiful graphical interfaces for tablet, phone, and PC? Then it's doomed. Does it require you to learn how to use an antiquated text editor that only a small niche of non-programmers are using? Then it's doomed. You can use org mode even if it is doomed to be irrelevant to normal people. It will continue to work. But it's not magic, please STOP TELLING ME IT'S MAGIC. It's not better than what's out there. There's companies sinking tons of money into todo apps and note taking apps that are integrating modern technologies that make any advantage of org mode complete obsolete in the world of advanced GUIs and language models.
eviks 4y ago
I wonder why a huge disadvantage of all these markup-in-plaintext formats if almost never mentioned: it breaks (the easiness of) search. So you can't simply type `simply type` in your search box to find your phrase because the markup interferes (What's the best way to deal with it? Are there plugins for the org/markdown etc. format that allow you to search the "invisible" markup-stripped text?)
- kldavis4 4y ago
  I think the technical solution to this is to simply index the documents in their rendered (or plain text) format and search against that. Unfortunately that would require an additional tool or plugin.
- hoosieree 4y ago
  Org-mode has many backends for exporting, including plain text and html, so if you open the exported document in a browser you can Ctrl+F to search and the browser at least ignores most markup. But I agree, this is an inconvenience common to all markup systems. In practice, I find org-mode to be much less "noisy" than latex or html for example, and about the same as markdown, so it's still a net win for me.
  - eviks 4y ago
    That's what I sometimes resort to, though copy&paste the text back to the editor as search in a browser is much worse
- dfinninger 4y ago
  Oh yes. There are many ways to search in Org mode. I typically only need tagging but you can use the agenda for searching as well. https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.ht...
  - eviks 4y ago
    So can you mention at least one way to simply search?
supernikio2 4y ago
I've tried org-mode a couple of time since people who use it rave about it so much, but it hasn't really stuck. Currenly I code/take quick notes in neovim, do some of the more serious writing in Obsidian, and general long-term notes are kept in notion. I would love to get into org-mode, to centralize all of these sources. Has anyone found themselves feeling the same way?
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  You should give https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim a try if you aren't currently. It isn't perfect, but I enjoy writing my notes in neovim more than the Obsidian app, so this works quite nicely.
clircle 4y ago
Writing in Org mode is a guaranteed way to ensure you won't collaborate with anyone on your work.
- julienchastang 4y ago
  Funny. Yesterday, I asked a co-worker to edit an org-mode document (it is plain text after all) that will be exported to Latex (because it is a lot easier to deal with Latex in org than to edit raw tex). To my surprise, he did not barf. Kudos to him, but yeah, I'm always apprehensive when I reveal my org workflow to colleagues.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    I find that to coworkers unfamiliar with the editor holy wars or strong opinions on text formats they'll just think "this is an interestingly formatted text document" and make their update :D
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  That depends on the coworkers really. If you got coworkers, who understand, that it is simply plain text, and who have a half decent editor or IDE, they will have at least OK-ish syntax highlighting and should really not have any problem editing the file or collaborating on it.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  Nothing wrong with that. The vast majority of my writing is for myself, and most of what I share is done in PDF or HTML format. I somewhat disagree with your claim though. Collaboration can take many forms, only one of which is multiple people editing the same document in its raw form.
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  OP here. Perhaps attempting to coerce orgmode upon others will satisfy the guarantee. Personally, my org workflow eases collaboration with people, because it removes friction for me, going from thoughts -to-> working document + code examples + plaintext diagrams and more. Frequently I have started technical, architectural, business documents in my local org file, and once I'm happy with it, exported to markdown for upload to the team wiki. It is a hard sell for group collaboration, compared to, say, markdown. But I would also say that such things are very context-dependent and group policy-driven. e.g. I know of one or two groups that foreswore markdown for ASCIIDOC as their standard text format for collaboration.
CmdrLoskene 4y ago
I love Org Mode too, but I still haven't pried myself entirely away from OneNote. There is still just too much stuff in my OneNote silo, and Office Lens is too convenient for capturing paper-bound information. I've settled into a hybrid workflow which keeps my vast Org Mode database at the center but retains use of OneNote. I'll also upvote the mention of BrainTool. It's so damned good!
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  OP here. OneNote was my daily driver, in my Windows-usin' days. Footnote #1 might interest you :) https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/index.html#fn1 https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...
joshilaurain17 4y ago
org mode is a flexible structure for plain text file format, composed of some simple, versatile or structure....
TacticalCoder 4y ago
I'm ashamed to admit that although I'm an Emacs poweruser (even getting okay'ish at writing elisp after all these years), I use org-mode but I'm terribly bad at it. I mostly use it because it allows collapsing text and don't use any advanced feature. I'll sometimes include pictures and a piece of code here or there but it's really mostly just text (I take it that's the whole point !?). And it'd say it's already quite good even when used in that "dumb" way.
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  OP here. I agree and warrant that is a perfectly legitimate way to use orgmode, viz. as much as one needs it to be, no more, no less. My personal use case was just plaintext notes, for quite a while. I still haven't included pictures anywhere (as in display inline). So you are more advanced than I, at least in that department :)
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I frequently teach new org-mode users how to just "click then tab" to expand nodes as well as using `context-menu-mode` right click. That way they don't have to remember any bindings, however I point out that the bindings are listed in case they every have interest in memorizing frequently used ones.
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    Ah the mouse on the other hand is something I rarely reach for : )
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  It's not you, a system like org mode that allows a user to be terribly bad is a failed system. It's a productivity system that makes you unproductive. It's the kind of yak shaving emacs users love to sell to unsuspecting programmers when they could use modern tools that actually increase their productivity from the start and don't suck them down a rabbit hole of wasted time only to realize they have to set up a small company's worth of infrastructure just to secure and sync notes.
oslac 4y ago
It would be nice if it was as easy to use as VSCode / Obsidian, but alas. I will not learn a second language for using it and I will not paste mystery snippets from blogs and other sources to get something done.
lycopodiopsida 4y ago
My favorite part about org-mode is that I can start with a technical outline and simply convert parts of it into tasks, which will appear in my agenda. It is so useful in my daywork that I cannot go back to omnifocus, which I used for many years and which has a better sync and mobile story.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
I'm sorry to say that Notepad, then Notepad++, have been my tools of choice for nearly 20 years. To-do lists, work journals (immensely useful as a knowledge base especially in short gigs), assignments, coding, the lot. I wrote most of my 90,000-odd word doctoral thesis in it. Notepad++ supports tons of keyboard shortcuts and has useful plugins. I can write neat LaTeX in it. I write research papers with it. It will save into any format I want and open almost any format I give to it. It is that simple, and that convenient, that I will never ever change tool, and no amount of write-ups of alternative personal knowledge bases on HN (and there are many, oh so many) will convince me otherwise.
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  OP here. I agree! The not so subtle meta-point of my post is to create a system around one's personal workflows and tastes. As I've stated in the post, orgmode was easy access for me because I was already using Emacs as my daily driver. Before my Emacs days, were my MS Office days, during which time OneNote was my go-to corporate survival tool and daily driver. Sounds like you've sorted yourself out handsomely. This is, ah, noteworthy :)
tconfrey 4y ago
Late to the conversation but in case the OP is still listening - great post and I'm totally aligned with your thinking. You mentioned my app, BrainTool, in the post (thanks for the inbound link!) so I thought you might be interested in my own rant on the topic: https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Org-for-interop.html https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or... Cheers,

164 points by adityaathalye 4y ago

I feel like org mode has almost become a joke it’s so oversold as the answer to all of life’s note taking problems. Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book and start presenting something they made in emacs… I think we all know using difficult tools tickles our programmer brains, but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?

whalesalad 4y ago
At the end of the day it’s just text. Not that different from markdown.
- matrix12 4y ago
  All code is just text...
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    Big org-enthusiast here, but need to defend markdown. Plenty of folks have workflows that allow for inline execution in markdown. Babel is WAY more powerful, but markdown is fine for most code snippets.
    - matrix12 4y ago
      Markdown does not have the same overlap with org-mode. Many use it more like a Jupyter notebook. External work flows would not be considered part of Markdown per se. #+call: something(foo=bar, list=baz[,0]) this level of features just does not exist in Markdown. Just not what it was designed for.
      - comfypotato 4y ago
        It just depends on what you’re trying to do. That could easily be done with Python and your favorite pip packages in a markdown code block, including the export (and importing a list of servers from another named markdown block). The benefits of org and babel are precisely that you can do it in whatever language you’ve written the rest of your literate programming document. As with most of these spectrums, markdown is less powerful and less complicated. Babel is one of the more confusing parts of org mode.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - paledot 4y ago
        I've never seen that done in CSS either. Why? Because that's not what CSS is for.
        matrix12 4y ago
        Well put. Markdown was not designed for the sorts of things Org-mode excels at.
        paledot 4y ago
        I (mis)interpreted the previous edit of your comment to be making exactly the opposite point.
      - PurpleRamen 4y ago
        That example is part of the tooling, not the format. One can do the same with markdown, just write the tool for it. Obsidian.md, a popular markdown-environment for example, has many extensions doing stuff like this. Similar has VS Code.
aeonik 4y ago
It's still in beta, but Logseq supports org-mode formatted notes and runs on mobile platforms. I just sync it to my computers. You can do it yourself, but they also offer a service. Giving presentations from org mode is sweet, because you can execute any code or examples right from the slides. Management doesn't need to know what the underlying tech is. Having a Google Docs like platform would be very cool though. I'm surprised there isn't a secure P2P framework that can do this in a browser yet. Overleaf for Latex is cool, but something that could operate on any plain text file like Markdown, org-mode, or Yaml seems like a cool idea: I suppose VSCode kinda supports this idea at the moment with extensions and remote sessions.
nvarsj 4y ago
I guess the main advantage of org is Emacs itself - it's infinitely customizable and you can quickly hack automation and workflows. That doesn't exist in anything else as far as I know. If you just want to get stuff done, then something like Obsidian/Bear is really good. I actually swapped from many years of org-mode/roam to Obsidian myself about 6 months ago. My main reason was mobile integration like you mention. Obsidian sync is actually magic for me, a bit like Dropbox was for files.
comfypotato 4y ago
You made a big jump from note taking to presenting something from a pine book. (And I’m upset by your comment because it’s ignorant.) The article’s author is much further down the rabbit hole than most. People don’t use org mode because it tickles their brain; I don’t at least. I use it, just to take notes and manage tasks, because nothing else worked. I didn’t start using org mode planning to be a devotee. It was just another iteration of trying a note-taking and time management solution. Noteable other failed approaches include Todoist, an old school paper agenda and notebooks, or an attempt at using the iPhone’s built-in reminders and notes. Finally I’ve stuck with something. It’s a testament to how good org is that it delivered enough value while I was still picking up Emacs (for the purpose of using org) that I stuck with it. Contrary to your point about org mode getting negative comments from management, my notes and scheduling in an org doc have gotten praise from my managers during Zoom screen shares. It probably only evokes comments because it’s different (as opposed to particularly impressive) but they are definitely positive comments.
- ithrow 4y ago
  What didn't work for you with Todoist? I'm using along side orgmode to quickly write down tasks on my phone.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    Todoist was too much of its own ecosystem. (I use reminders for mobile task generation because Im comfortable in Apple’s ecosystem.) I wasn’t willing to learn the Todoist ecosystem with the risk of them changing it on a whim. (I’m also elisp-savvy so I can hack org mode to do exactly what I want, but that’s not the real issue/selling point.) It’s mostly not wanting to learn Todoist. I’d rather learn org mode knowing it’s mature. It drives me nuts when corps change the tools I use. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, you know? The risk of having a workflow-breaking change at an annoying time stresses me too much. Org mode changes at a much slower pace, and it’s much easier to use an older version of org while I adapt to the changes. There’s definitely nothing I do in org that can’t be done in Todoist. So theoretically Todoist would actually be better right now because of the mobile integration. I really like knowing that there’s a lot of room to grow with org mode, though. The workflow I aspire to is much more possible with org mode in the long run.
radiator 4y ago
I am not a user of orgmode, but: Managers would not have an opinion on the technical tools used for a presentation but would rather focus on important things, like clarity of message, tempo etc. But even if they do have an opinion, who cares?
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
> the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. Isn't it incredible that we've lost the ability, as a culture, to be on top of things without our pocket supercomputers? I don't need org mode on my phone. I dont need it on every device I own. I use org mode on my PC, and if I need any form of portability I can jot stuff down on a little piece of paper. Also, it's just text. We have countless services that can synchronize plain text files. Stop being whiney and pick one. > And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book Stop being so snotty. > and start presenting something they made in emacs… Yeah, I love an editor talk actually. Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I’d never heard it put that way, that presenting in an editor is a strong no-bullshit signal, but how true is this! I had a professor who would teach from Emacs. She would store each section of the lecture in a register and paste as she went. (Watching her cursor flit around the buffer was actually strong encouragement for me to learn Emacs; it was nice to see how deftly it could be done without interrupting the flow of the lecture.) She had slides too, but obviously being in Emacs for these portions allowed interactive displays of code execution.
- abeppu 4y ago
  > Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit. I think there are two kinds of bullshit relevant to meetings. One is spin or dishonesty, and the other is wasting people's time. Presenting with an editor can mean that what's about to be presented is honest and straight-forward, being grounded in the actual matter being discussed. Or it can mean that an engineer did zero prep for the meeting.
  - ithrow 4y ago
    Here is Rich Hickey doing a conference talk in orgmode ;) https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376 https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376
mcshicks 4y ago
Will I still be able to use Bear in 2033? I'm pretty sure I will still be able to use org mode and emacs. I agree org mode is not very good for collaboration but for that I think really things like Google keep and Google docs are much easier. I liked Wunderlist for that but alas it's gone.
- CmdrLoskene 4y ago
  Wunderlist lives on, rebranded as Microsoft ToDo. As far as I can tell it's the exact same product, same feature set, etc. I think they made the transition unnecessarily clunky, but it's all there.
  - mcshicks 4y ago
    They closed the API's I used to sync with org mode.
    - CmdrLoskene 4y ago
      That does suck.
xenodium 4y ago
> Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com author here. Got plenty of happy iOS users doing those things.
- adityaathalye 4y ago
  Thanks for making plainorg! I had listed it in my (hopefully incomplete) list of org-compatible tools in the post :) cf. the section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/index.html#but-seriously-emacs-winkwink-amirite https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...
  - xenodium 4y ago
    Thank you! =)
mtts 4y ago
You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones. I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools. This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use. Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs. This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  I'd rather say that phones aren't a good tool for Org-mode: they are very challenged at text input (no keys) and interfaces that avoid text with buttons, dragging, and other reliable gestures have the advantage of minimizing the text and quasi-text input that is the backbone of Org-mode and Emacs in general.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    That's a long way of saying that you don't think of phones as a legitimate use case, but the rest of the world mostly disagrees with you. I've got ten years of orgmode buffers and I'm actively working to transition to Obsidian because the mobile story is so much better. With plugins like tasks, dataview, and outliner, I can do pretty much anything in Obsidian I could do in Org, and I can do it on my iPad without having to SSH to my Linode instance first. that's powerful.
    - ithrow 4y ago
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Never heard of Bear before, but it looks fundamentally unusable to me: limited platform support, possibly requiring serverside storage, charging for encryption, so if you're a free user don't expect notes to be private. I honestly find the concept of charging for note-taking software offensive. It's simple text, storage space is not a meaningful concern, serverside storage is fundamentally unnecessary and a security/privacy concern. This in my mind is just sloppy, overcomplicated, rent-seeking crap. It fails to meet even a single of the fairly rudimentary features i need for note-taking. Even a terrible text editor like nano would be more useful.
- ithrow 4y ago
  Yeah just checked Bear out, it can't even fold headlines.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
There is a way to make slide decks using org mode and they actually look pretty professional. Go watch any David Wilson stream on YouTube.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  "System Crafters" is the Youtube channel referenced: https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists
uludag 4y ago
Just the thought of having some product manager trying to determine how a productivity app I use fits into their business objectives is reason enough to use something like org-mode. If there is a joke, I think it would be all the churn that "conventional" productivity apps have gone through. I used Evernote before switching to org-mode. The Evernote interface is completely unrecognizable and many vital features have been taken away. Not only that, I'm sure that in a few years it will change even more. Bear may have a more user-friendly product direction but they're still a business trying to make profit. Will the Bear service work in 10 years? Maybe. Will I be able to find a synchronization solution for my org-files? almost certainly.
mik1998 4y ago
Emacs for Android! It's a thing.
throwanem 4y ago
Back in 2017 I presented a new internal product to some VPs, most of whom I'd never met before, from org-mode source with slides via org-reveal. That remains one of the two or three most highly lauded presentations I've yet given, in a career now heading toward its 25th year. Org is easier to use and more capable now than it was then, and so is the tooling around it. That includes mobile; most, maybe all, of the apps linked from the article didn't exist back then, and there are several others not mentioned there. The community's grown significantly, too. So I'm not sure what point you think you're making here, but what I'm hearing is that you don't feel the need to have any familiarity with a technology before offhandedly dismissing it as meme nonsense apparently on the strength of a lot of people trying it and finding it good enough to be worth talking about. I wouldn't be comfortable with making such a showing of myself, but tastes differ, I suppose.
rchaud 4y ago
This comment reminds me of the negative reaction on the Nokia story a few days ago where they announced they'd be making phones with replaceable parts. "Who even needs a phone that doesn't have top-of-the-line imaging sensors! Are you going to take your engagement photos on that?" Completely missing the point.
BeetleB 4y ago
Funny, I've authored probably half of my presentations at work since around 2016 using Org. Either export to Beamer or use org-reveal. No one cares. Of course, Powerpoint is superior in some ways, so I still use it. And if the manager needs a document he can make changes to, then I'll use Powerpoint. But these are exceptions, not the rule. > but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs? Only works on Apple? A non-starter for me. I type way better on a keyboard on my Linux machine, so any note taking app needs to work on it. And Org mode has been around for 20 years. I have notes I wrote almost 15 years ago in it. I want some guarantee that whatever tool I use will work 20 years from now. As a general rule, if you have to pay for a niche tool to use it, do not expect it to last two decades.

Lyngbakr 4y ago

I really like Org Mode, but I only need a tiny amount of its functionality. Emacs is my editor of choice anyway, so it's convenient to use Org Mode for my personal daily to-do list and backlog. And not even for a specific workflow system (e.g., GTD or whatever), just tasks with scheduled dates, deadlines, and some custom states. Agenda view is neat, too. That's plenty for me. It always impresses me though when I see how much others can do with it!

adityaathalye 4y ago
Likewise, re: "subset that I find useful". As I note in the post, I've never used it for TODOs etc. What keeps me in the org life is that whenever I've wanted to do X, orgmode itself and the wider ecosystem have answered "sure, here you go". And, personally, any learning curve + configuration overhead has been worth it because it composes as a unified system. My brain fares poorly if it has to jump between contexts for a single task (e.g. write lecture/talk notes, separately make a slide deck to present, separately make a live notebook / repo to run a demo, and then have to bounce between the three at run-time). I don't know... each to their own. This works for me, and I wish others tools that work for them. Life is too short for the annoyance borne of bad-fit personal tools. edit: clarify opening line

29athrowaway 4y ago

Placebo of the day, pick one at random: - Zettelkasten - Pomodoro - Org mode - 4 day work weeks

seanw444 4y ago
"It's all in your head bro. Keeping track of things the way you find most effective isn't important."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Let me add a note here to my zettelkasten orgmode pomodoro: "write clever reply on HN". That will do.

totalhack 4y ago

Wish there was a better org mode plugin in vs code.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
Yeah I recently had a teammate that wanted to collaborate with an org-roam I made public for my teammates. We evaluated the org mode plugins for vscode and even the very important use case of folding/unfolding headings was pretty bad. Went like this: teammate: vscode org plugins can't even fold/unfold with good bindings? teammate: What shortcuts do you use for folding/unfolding" me: tab and shift-tab teammate: just give me basic emacs So I setup a basic emacs config with context-menu-mode and recommended learning these shortcuts: - TAB/shift-tab for folding/unfolding - alt arrow keys for moving up/down and promoting/demoting - ctrl+enter for making a new heading and the guiding principle of "if you get confused go to the menu bar" or look at the ugly but helpful context-sensitive toolbar.

zkry 4y ago

I’ve tried so many productivity apps over and org-mode has been the only one that has stuck. I would say what sets it apart from other applications is its malleability. For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task. And the best part is that can be sure that I will be able to use org-mode for the rest of my career on the same terms.

BeetleB 4y ago
> For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task. This is screaming for a blog post entry. It's pretty cool.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I agree. I have a similar account where I: - started using a pomodoro timer in emacs - noticed I wasn't using getting up for breaks - thought about how to fix it - added `(switch-to-buffer "~/reminder.txt")` which read "HEY! go on a break" to the "org-clock-out" hook that was called by the pomodoro timer In about 5-7 minutes I permantely fixed my issue thanks to the extensibility of emacs. I think a lot of these things don't get shared or posted because to the initiated they seem trivial. Or it's hard to know what level of experience should be assumed. I think "start with vanilla emacs and show how to do this one thing" might be a good place though.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    That's really cool. As for how to share in the blog post, I would not recommend starting with vanilla emacs - that would make for a really long blog post. Perhaps just vanilla org config (for people like me who don't use org clocking abilities). Simply post the problem you had and the code you wrote to fix it. Then post it to the Emacs Reddit and Mastodon (you'll get much more engagement from the latter if anyone on your instance/followers is an Emacs person).

adityaathalye 4y ago

My live demoscene version of using org looks like this (including demofails, which we don't worry about because we have probably already published the blog post version :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rickstanley 4y ago

Funny, I'm using Doom Emacs and I just tried Org Mode for the first time, for a simple note (M-x org-add-note); wrote the note and then finished with `C-c C-c`, I have no idea where it went! :) Love it when I push myself to explore a new tool. (The only clue that I have is that the command description says: "Add a note to the current entry".)

adityaathalye 4y ago
Welcome to the org life :) I don't use Doom, but it seems to have pre-configured location for the default orgmode file, which, of course you can change at will. ref: https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/modules/lang/org/#/configuration https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/modules/lang/org/#/configu...
- rickstanley 4y ago
  Thanks! I'll try reading their manual (or follow some tutorial). For now, I'll be using Org-roam[0], seems to be much simpler [route] to add and find notes and it even comes with first class support for Doom (see "Using Doom Emacs" section)! - [0]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

yewenjie 4y ago

I know HN loves org-mode, and so I, but goddamn it, it is 2023 and there still no sane good-enough parser for org-mode?

adityaathalye 4y ago
I'd love an LSP-mode for org. But that may be difficult, because the formal grammar is quite vast. ref: A formal grammar for Org: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-04/msg00108.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-04/msg...
- e3bc54b2 4y ago
  There is a tree-sitter parser in the works and neovim plugin is already using it. I think that makes more sense than full blown LSP.
  - adityaathalye 4y ago
    True, but why not wish for the whole kitchen sink? :) But on a more serious note, would you agree that an LSP server at par with Emacs Org Mode will validate the sufficiency of a standard grammar? That in turn will allow all sorts of apps to bloom. Right now everyone is having to roll their own for whatever subset of org they choose to support. And the fact of having to roll one's own is the limiting factor for feature support. Which isn't terrible, because partial compatibility can work just fine.
natrys 4y ago
There is though: https://github.com/tecosaur/Org.jl https://github.com/tecosaur/Org.jl
- seanw444 4y ago
  Julia? Odd choice for that, but cool regardless.

lvh 4y ago

> Version-controlled and Highly Reproducible: I can go back to any saved version of any of the org files above, and reliably reproduce output for "distribution" (PDF, tex, HTML etc.). In other words, it is all highly reproducible. I love org-mode, I've lived the org-mode life, I ran a consultancy entirely off of it (time tracking, invoicing, task list management), I wrote a book in it... But boy, it was not reproducible. It is maybe salvageable because it's plaintext. It's definitely easy to version control. But tons of stuff, including e.g. details of how exports and tangling worked, broke between org versions. TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode.

foobarian 4y ago
I tried it for a while but ran into similar issues. Ultimately I settled on a plain text file with the only format being ISO dates alone on a line for date tags. Daily entries since 2010 :-)
adityaathalye 4y ago
Thanks for the experience report. May I include it in my post? Better still, if you've blogged about it, I will be happy to link across, in context. You are correct in ascribing my enthusiasm to a narrow use-case.
- lvh 4y ago
  Sure! I didn't blog about it, but it is in the issue tracker of e.g. https://github.com/crypto101/book https://github.com/crypto101/book.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode. Maybe this is changing? I pretty heavily use noweb features for instance. Hm, it seems like you mean reproducability of export though which I don't use as much.

indymike 4y ago

The magic moment for me with org-mode was when I realized you could collect TODOs out of comments in code... in addition to calendar... in addition to "second brain" note taking... in addition to the fact the files were just text... and could be managed nicely with git... At this point, I've moved on from Emac for code editing, but I still use org-mode.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xwdv 4y ago

This blog would benefit from a bit more line spacing.

adityaathalye 4y ago
Thanks for the note. Please could you send me a screenshot (email in profile), and perhaps some detail on your device + os + browser combination? I've aimed for density, and proportions defined under a modular scale. As far as I've seen it appears to work as I want it to (my devices, friends' devices) --- body text lines are compact but not squashed. Ref: https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css line-height: var(--scale-l); font-size: var(--scale-l); I will think about it... there are some other typographic niggles I should like to fix. Maybe this will be my excuse :)
- xwdv 4y ago
  Not sure but these serif fonts need to breathe more. This is an iPhone 14.
  - gnuj3 4y ago
    Agreed on that. I had to take a break from reading this post just because of how unreadable that blog UI is

abeppu 4y ago

Every so often I get into using org mode for a while, and the first day or so is always great. But, as with every similar tool in the space, I quickly find cases where the different features don't compose or interact well. For example, - org mode will fill out/align an ascii table if you start it and tab. When you change a cell, just tab, and everything aligns into a well-formed table again. Great! - org mode will let you type latex and then `C-c C-x C-l` to render those latex snippets in text. Lovely! - but the table logic is unaware of whether $latex-snippets$ have been rendered or not, so you can't see an aligned table whose cells contain latex snippets Yes, one could do the whole table in latex, but this is more verbose and more fragile if one is incrementally building out the table as one takes notes, and occasionally previewing to confirm it's not broken. Roughly, I think this illustrates a key tension where - if everything is pure text, then improving tools is 'easy' - but people don't actually want pure text for all uses; for some domains, dealing only with text requires some mental energy which can detract from the actual task of interest

tra3 4y ago
Absolutely agree, however the alternatives are lacking. What you get with org (and other plain text formats) is that conversion is easy. I typically do 80% of the my authoring in org, and then finalize the last 20% elsewhere. Is it perfect? No. But pragmatic.
ilovecaching 4y ago
Don't use org mode. As I said in another comment in this thread, the whole idea is just egregious yak shaving. Does org mode have semantic understanding of keywords and a language AI to record my tasks for me? Then it's doomed. Does it sync in the cloud and have world class security (only storing decryption keys at rest in specialized hardware, locally on a TPM like device)? Then it's doomed. Does it have beautiful graphical interfaces for tablet, phone, and PC? Then it's doomed. Does it require you to learn how to use an antiquated text editor that only a small niche of non-programmers are using? Then it's doomed. You can use org mode even if it is doomed to be irrelevant to normal people. It will continue to work. But it's not magic, please STOP TELLING ME IT'S MAGIC. It's not better than what's out there. There's companies sinking tons of money into todo apps and note taking apps that are integrating modern technologies that make any advantage of org mode complete obsolete in the world of advanced GUIs and language models.

eviks 4y ago

I wonder why a huge disadvantage of all these markup-in-plaintext formats if almost never mentioned: it breaks (the easiness of) search. So you can't simply type `simply type` in your search box to find your phrase because the markup interferes (What's the best way to deal with it? Are there plugins for the org/markdown etc. format that allow you to search the "invisible" markup-stripped text?)

kldavis4 4y ago
I think the technical solution to this is to simply index the documents in their rendered (or plain text) format and search against that. Unfortunately that would require an additional tool or plugin.
hoosieree 4y ago
Org-mode has many backends for exporting, including plain text and html, so if you open the exported document in a browser you can Ctrl+F to search and the browser at least ignores most markup. But I agree, this is an inconvenience common to all markup systems. In practice, I find org-mode to be much less "noisy" than latex or html for example, and about the same as markdown, so it's still a net win for me.
- eviks 4y ago
  That's what I sometimes resort to, though copy&paste the text back to the editor as search in a browser is much worse
dfinninger 4y ago
Oh yes. There are many ways to search in Org mode. I typically only need tagging but you can use the agenda for searching as well. https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.ht...
- eviks 4y ago
  So can you mention at least one way to simply search?

supernikio2 4y ago

I've tried org-mode a couple of time since people who use it rave about it so much, but it hasn't really stuck. Currenly I code/take quick notes in neovim, do some of the more serious writing in Obsidian, and general long-term notes are kept in notion. I would love to get into org-mode, to centralize all of these sources. Has anyone found themselves feeling the same way?

dinkleberg 4y ago
You should give https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim a try if you aren't currently. It isn't perfect, but I enjoy writing my notes in neovim more than the Obsidian app, so this works quite nicely.

clircle 4y ago

Writing in Org mode is a guaranteed way to ensure you won't collaborate with anyone on your work.

julienchastang 4y ago
Funny. Yesterday, I asked a co-worker to edit an org-mode document (it is plain text after all) that will be exported to Latex (because it is a lot easier to deal with Latex in org than to edit raw tex). To my surprise, he did not barf. Kudos to him, but yeah, I'm always apprehensive when I reveal my org workflow to colleagues.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I find that to coworkers unfamiliar with the editor holy wars or strong opinions on text formats they'll just think "this is an interestingly formatted text document" and make their update :D
zelphirkalt 4y ago
That depends on the coworkers really. If you got coworkers, who understand, that it is simply plain text, and who have a half decent editor or IDE, they will have at least OK-ish syntax highlighting and should really not have any problem editing the file or collaborating on it.
bachmeier 4y ago
Nothing wrong with that. The vast majority of my writing is for myself, and most of what I share is done in PDF or HTML format. I somewhat disagree with your claim though. Collaboration can take many forms, only one of which is multiple people editing the same document in its raw form.
adityaathalye 4y ago
OP here. Perhaps attempting to coerce orgmode upon others will satisfy the guarantee. Personally, my org workflow eases collaboration with people, because it removes friction for me, going from thoughts -to-> working document + code examples + plaintext diagrams and more. Frequently I have started technical, architectural, business documents in my local org file, and once I'm happy with it, exported to markdown for upload to the team wiki. It is a hard sell for group collaboration, compared to, say, markdown. But I would also say that such things are very context-dependent and group policy-driven. e.g. I know of one or two groups that foreswore markdown for ASCIIDOC as their standard text format for collaboration.

CmdrLoskene 4y ago

I love Org Mode too, but I still haven't pried myself entirely away from OneNote. There is still just too much stuff in my OneNote silo, and Office Lens is too convenient for capturing paper-bound information. I've settled into a hybrid workflow which keeps my vast Org Mode database at the center but retains use of OneNote. I'll also upvote the mention of BrainTool. It's so damned good!

adityaathalye 4y ago
OP here. OneNote was my daily driver, in my Windows-usin' days. Footnote #1 might interest you :) https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/index.html#fn1 https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...

joshilaurain17 4y ago

org mode is a flexible structure for plain text file format, composed of some simple, versatile or structure....

TacticalCoder 4y ago

I'm ashamed to admit that although I'm an Emacs poweruser (even getting okay'ish at writing elisp after all these years), I use org-mode but I'm terribly bad at it. I mostly use it because it allows collapsing text and don't use any advanced feature. I'll sometimes include pictures and a piece of code here or there but it's really mostly just text (I take it that's the whole point !?). And it'd say it's already quite good even when used in that "dumb" way.

adityaathalye 4y ago
OP here. I agree and warrant that is a perfectly legitimate way to use orgmode, viz. as much as one needs it to be, no more, no less. My personal use case was just plaintext notes, for quite a while. I still haven't included pictures anywhere (as in display inline). So you are more advanced than I, at least in that department :)
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
I frequently teach new org-mode users how to just "click then tab" to expand nodes as well as using `context-menu-mode` right click. That way they don't have to remember any bindings, however I point out that the bindings are listed in case they every have interest in memorizing frequently used ones.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Ah the mouse on the other hand is something I rarely reach for : )
ilovecaching 4y ago
It's not you, a system like org mode that allows a user to be terribly bad is a failed system. It's a productivity system that makes you unproductive. It's the kind of yak shaving emacs users love to sell to unsuspecting programmers when they could use modern tools that actually increase their productivity from the start and don't suck them down a rabbit hole of wasted time only to realize they have to set up a small company's worth of infrastructure just to secure and sync notes.

oslac 4y ago

It would be nice if it was as easy to use as VSCode / Obsidian, but alas. I will not learn a second language for using it and I will not paste mystery snippets from blogs and other sources to get something done.

lycopodiopsida 4y ago

My favorite part about org-mode is that I can start with a technical outline and simply convert parts of it into tasks, which will appear in my agenda. It is so useful in my daywork that I cannot go back to omnifocus, which I used for many years and which has a better sync and mobile story.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

I'm sorry to say that Notepad, then Notepad++, have been my tools of choice for nearly 20 years. To-do lists, work journals (immensely useful as a knowledge base especially in short gigs), assignments, coding, the lot. I wrote most of my 90,000-odd word doctoral thesis in it. Notepad++ supports tons of keyboard shortcuts and has useful plugins. I can write neat LaTeX in it. I write research papers with it. It will save into any format I want and open almost any format I give to it. It is that simple, and that convenient, that I will never ever change tool, and no amount of write-ups of alternative personal knowledge bases on HN (and there are many, oh so many) will convince me otherwise.

adityaathalye 4y ago
OP here. I agree! The not so subtle meta-point of my post is to create a system around one's personal workflows and tastes. As I've stated in the post, orgmode was easy access for me because I was already using Emacs as my daily driver. Before my Emacs days, were my MS Office days, during which time OneNote was my go-to corporate survival tool and daily driver. Sounds like you've sorted yourself out handsomely. This is, ah, noteworthy :)

tconfrey 4y ago

Late to the conversation but in case the OP is still listening - great post and I'm totally aligned with your thinking. You mentioned my app, BrainTool, in the post (thanks for the inbound link!) so I thought you might be interested in my own rant on the topic: https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Org-for-interop.html https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or... Cheers,