6 ms·

I love keeping a personal diary. Typically, I write around 500-1000 words daily, but there are days when I let myself go and write up to 3000 or more. Over the

by taopai 3y ago

I love keeping a personal diary. Typically, I write around 500-1000 words daily, but there are days when I let myself go and write up to 3000 or more. Over the course of a year, this adds up to about +200_000 words. I used to be very disorganized and never found the right tool to do this job. Using .md files are a good solution but I am grateful I found Emacs and org-mode last year, it's amazing. For this purpose and much more. Keeping a personal diary has proven to be an awesome entertainment. I tend to forget many things over time. Particularly during challenging or memorable experiences, I often forget how I felt and what thoughts occupied my mind. Taking the time to relax and read about interesting weeks from the previous year feels like immersing myself in a novel written by a complete stranger. If you have an inclination towards writing, I encourage you to give it a try. Personally, I used to dislike writing, but once I started, my perspective changed. If you don't get yourself to like it, then do something else. Some people think the best while walking, others need to talk to a themselves or friend. I must mention that writing and reading in my native language have significantly improved my speech. I used to struggle with finding the right words during casual conversations and often ended up rambling. Now, uncommon words come to me effortlessly, and now I usually assist others in finding the right words when they're stuck. I think LLM are great for getting feedback, specially in other languages. You can ask the bot to rewrite one difficult paragraph and study the differences, or check if a native would use the same words you wrote. It's great for learning and experimenting.

lloydatkinson 3y ago
Do you have a TLDR of this often mentioned org mode? I have never used emacs. From what I have seen it’s an append only text file with none of the markdown formatting?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  vimwiki works perfectly for a diary as well - its a breeze to use for that.
- benheath 3y ago
  https://orgmode.org/quickstart.html https://orgmode.org/quickstart.html I’d say you’re mostly right. I’ve used org mode a lot in the past. Now I use One Note, which I’m sure would draw a lot of complaints from this group, but it works for me. I think use whatever works best for you, try different things and stick with what you end up liking.
- kitchi 3y ago
  I've personally tried a bunch of writing and note taking approaches, and since it's such a personal process your personal preferences strongly dictate what works for you and what doesn't, at least in my experience. Org mode is crazy powerful but has a steep learning curve, and coupled with being new to emacs it can be quite daunting. While I personally use doom emacs as my daily editor I found org mode didn't suit my way of working. I recently re-discovered Obsidian and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's very flexible, works in a way that I find intuitive to my brain and it's allowed me to keep a (almost) daily journal, as well as turned into a repository for notes I make about work projects and everything else. I'd recommend checking it out alongside org-mode.
- wenc 3y ago
  If you like org-mode, which is essentially an outliner, check out Logseq. Logseq is a “second brain” but its primary format is a daily journal. This threw me off at first because I like to file knowledge into different topics. But turns out you can just throw random thoughts at it daily in bullet points, hashtag main points, and later see all hashtags in a single view. This encourages you to keep writing on different topics without organizing them first, and still be able to have a coherent view a certain topic later (just click on the hashtag). You can even build queries for bullet points in your bullet points. Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify uses Logseq. Logseq is essentially like a huge Lisp engine but with a modern Markdown interface.
- novax81 3y ago
  Based on the comments (I'm also unfamiliar with emacs), you may also want to look into Obsidian. It keeps a local vault of files with some file structure magic to basically let you both easily jot down notes for later and find them (tag/header searching, etc) but also link them together (select some text -> extract into new note, and it backlinks, etc). For a bit I tried to get into being a "power user" of it, using scripts to collect things, add interactive widgets, bla bla. But at the end of the day, I've found it much more enjoyable to use in a very general way, linking documents together (I keep a personal writing vault, and a separate work vault) and giving myself ways to mash through ideas when typing makes more sense.
  - lloydatkinson 3y ago
    This is what I use, it does have its frustrations.
- Syntonicles 3y ago
  Org mode is like outlining mixed with long form writing. You can write a novel, either by writing it sequentially or fleshing out an outline of chapters. You can make TODO lists and other systems in it. At its base, it's like Workflowy+MSWord. You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel. You can include blocks of functioning source code like a Jupyter notebook. You can export all of it to formatted HTML or PDF or whatever you like. You can write Lisp programs to interact with the structure and collection of your documents. This lets you build entire applications and workflows. One such application will traverse all of your documents, construct a prioritized agenda and schedule any TODO items that it finds. Vanilla (unmodified) Emacs has an ugly org-mode that looks less inviting and less powerful than Notepad. Do not be fooled by this. A few add-on packages turn it into something powerful and beautiful.
  - proamdev123 3y ago
    > You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel. Actually, tables in org mode have function capability like Excel too. Obviously not the full, extensive capabilities of Excel, but they are far more than simply text formatted as a table.
- taopai 3y ago
  I like org-mode but what I like the most is the whole Emacs ecosystem. You can tweak org-mode and customized to your liking. You can think of org-mode as interactive markup language. It has a lot of features for managing TODOs but what I like the most I hiding or displaying sections, exporting directly to latex or html using custom classes with a simple keybinding and so one. It takes time to get familiar with Emacs. I started on October and was spending one hour a day during two weeks to get familiar with it. You have to take it very slow because there are a lot of keybidings, concepts and functions. It is like learning to play piano. But once you get it it's awesome and it is lots of fun. This May I started getting serious with elisp, the Emacs scripting language (also Emacs own language, C and elisp), and it's amazing. You can automate everything you want really easily. I wrote some elisp functions that made my life so much useful. I used to have tons of bash shells open over the place. Now I have some key bindings that automate the usual tasks. Some written in bash but others written in elisp or a mix so I have a nice UI and can have easy selection or can add parameters and interact with my documents. If you have time, are curious and like to hack I totally recommend giving it a try. Also the community is amazing. Getting into Emacs made me discover other funny things like mailing lists, Usenet and even philosophers! I am not an expert and I will never be but for me it is a lot of fun. Also the community is awesome.

by taopai 3y ago

lloydatkinson 3y ago

Do you have a TLDR of this often mentioned org mode? I have never used emacs. From what I have seen it’s an append only text file with none of the markdown formatting?

ekianjo 3y ago
vimwiki works perfectly for a diary as well - its a breeze to use for that.
benheath 3y ago
https://orgmode.org/quickstart.html https://orgmode.org/quickstart.html I’d say you’re mostly right. I’ve used org mode a lot in the past. Now I use One Note, which I’m sure would draw a lot of complaints from this group, but it works for me. I think use whatever works best for you, try different things and stick with what you end up liking.
kitchi 3y ago
I've personally tried a bunch of writing and note taking approaches, and since it's such a personal process your personal preferences strongly dictate what works for you and what doesn't, at least in my experience. Org mode is crazy powerful but has a steep learning curve, and coupled with being new to emacs it can be quite daunting. While I personally use doom emacs as my daily editor I found org mode didn't suit my way of working. I recently re-discovered Obsidian and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's very flexible, works in a way that I find intuitive to my brain and it's allowed me to keep a (almost) daily journal, as well as turned into a repository for notes I make about work projects and everything else. I'd recommend checking it out alongside org-mode.
wenc 3y ago
If you like org-mode, which is essentially an outliner, check out Logseq. Logseq is a “second brain” but its primary format is a daily journal. This threw me off at first because I like to file knowledge into different topics. But turns out you can just throw random thoughts at it daily in bullet points, hashtag main points, and later see all hashtags in a single view. This encourages you to keep writing on different topics without organizing them first, and still be able to have a coherent view a certain topic later (just click on the hashtag). You can even build queries for bullet points in your bullet points. Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify uses Logseq. Logseq is essentially like a huge Lisp engine but with a modern Markdown interface.
novax81 3y ago
Based on the comments (I'm also unfamiliar with emacs), you may also want to look into Obsidian. It keeps a local vault of files with some file structure magic to basically let you both easily jot down notes for later and find them (tag/header searching, etc) but also link them together (select some text -> extract into new note, and it backlinks, etc). For a bit I tried to get into being a "power user" of it, using scripts to collect things, add interactive widgets, bla bla. But at the end of the day, I've found it much more enjoyable to use in a very general way, linking documents together (I keep a personal writing vault, and a separate work vault) and giving myself ways to mash through ideas when typing makes more sense.
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  This is what I use, it does have its frustrations.
Syntonicles 3y ago
Org mode is like outlining mixed with long form writing. You can write a novel, either by writing it sequentially or fleshing out an outline of chapters. You can make TODO lists and other systems in it. At its base, it's like Workflowy+MSWord. You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel. You can include blocks of functioning source code like a Jupyter notebook. You can export all of it to formatted HTML or PDF or whatever you like. You can write Lisp programs to interact with the structure and collection of your documents. This lets you build entire applications and workflows. One such application will traverse all of your documents, construct a prioritized agenda and schedule any TODO items that it finds. Vanilla (unmodified) Emacs has an ugly org-mode that looks less inviting and less powerful than Notepad. Do not be fooled by this. A few add-on packages turn it into something powerful and beautiful.
- proamdev123 3y ago
  > You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel. Actually, tables in org mode have function capability like Excel too. Obviously not the full, extensive capabilities of Excel, but they are far more than simply text formatted as a table.
taopai 3y ago
I like org-mode but what I like the most is the whole Emacs ecosystem. You can tweak org-mode and customized to your liking. You can think of org-mode as interactive markup language. It has a lot of features for managing TODOs but what I like the most I hiding or displaying sections, exporting directly to latex or html using custom classes with a simple keybinding and so one. It takes time to get familiar with Emacs. I started on October and was spending one hour a day during two weeks to get familiar with it. You have to take it very slow because there are a lot of keybidings, concepts and functions. It is like learning to play piano. But once you get it it's awesome and it is lots of fun. This May I started getting serious with elisp, the Emacs scripting language (also Emacs own language, C and elisp), and it's amazing. You can automate everything you want really easily. I wrote some elisp functions that made my life so much useful. I used to have tons of bash shells open over the place. Now I have some key bindings that automate the usual tasks. Some written in bash but others written in elisp or a mix so I have a nice UI and can have easy selection or can add parameters and interact with my documents. If you have time, are curious and like to hack I totally recommend giving it a try. Also the community is amazing. Getting into Emacs made me discover other funny things like mailing lists, Usenet and even philosophers! I am not an expert and I will never be but for me it is a lot of fun. Also the community is awesome.