Worg, the Org-Mode Community

I might have to finally try it if so many people are claiming life-changing effects!

I don't create or edit code for a living, for the most part, but I do use vim to edit workstation/server files and side-projects as well as a fair bit for notes and todo lists. I share the notes with an always-on raspberry pi via syncthing, which I can SSH into to check in a pinch.

There isn't much incentive in this case to switch to emacs, then (although the idea of a wearable rpi with emacspeak instead of a HUD has always intrigued). My current todo list for keeping organised, after recently moving off of Trello, needed to be reasonably smart to replace it.

I think the solution is smart yet simple enough to work long term. It has been OK for a month or two now, at least, but I'm still open to improvements. It's basically a vertical kanban board, instead of the usual horizontal one. I don't need time tracking, as I don't bill that way (but if it were automated, again, I'm open to it - could be interesting) but it would be nice to have alerts and reminders. For those I set reminders in tkremind for the important stuff - also copied and synced to the pi. The workflow is this:

- Tasks are entered into the relevant folding section, prepended with a timestamp [F5], with a #tag.

- As tasks complete, I delete/paste [dd/p] into the invoicing section, if required.

- Then [key binding] moves the item to 'the last line of the file' where a log has built up in roughly chronological order, returning the cursor to the same line.

This basically replicates Trello locally, but with the advantage of speed, grep-ability [grep -m 10 '#projectX' todo.txt] and privacy. The other open source kanban options looked good, but I am a big fan of text files, as org-mode users probably are too.

I'm now wondering if org-mode would be an upgrade or an over-complication... acutely aware of the irony of spending all this time on getting organised in order to be more productive.

or you could move to neovim, open a terminal in neovim and launch console emacs inside it just for org-mode :)

This is true, and it's happened to me too. The first time it did, I pinned my version to a working stable one, and thought maybe I should write some unit tests for org. That was years ago, and I've been too busy ever since, but there's always the possibility to contribute (or fork . . . ).

> I might have to finally try it if so many people are claiming life-changing effects!

Org, much like emacs, is like catnip to a certain minded type of individual. This might stem from both being written in lisp (http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html).

Both are infinitely malleable to your needs, yet surprisingly effective out of the box for their intended use cases; the tweaking only comes later when you go "I wonder if I can do this." It also opens your eyes when you realize it's all just text (http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-em...).

Beware though: you can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole, it can be made over complicated, but if you KISS and keep disciplined, both emacs and org are powerful tools.

A couple things. Simple outlining, to me, gets a big part of the mindmapping benefit, at least if you're often collapsing and expanding documents so you get big picture and drill down to smaller. Of course, outlining has basically a single heirarchy and doesn't do what mindmapping does with showing relationships between disparate headings. In Org-mode the "Agenda" is where you would generate, view, and process these kinds of relationships, by doing searches, potentially over hundreds of different files.

The Agenda is one of the two or three major parts of Org-mode (also one part where many/most users barely scratch surface of what it can do). It's definitely a different model of associating connections from what you get in the usual mindmap application. But, I would argue, not less powerful. In fact, I think using the Agenda to find relationships is probably more powerful than mindmapping, but it requires perhaps a bit more effort since the connections aren't directly visible, need to do searches and have items gathered together in Agenda buffer to "see" them. All of this probably makes little sense until you've fully grokked how Org-mode can work (but which probably the majority of Org users never do). Org is one of the most full-featured applications I can think of, both in breadth and depth of features, far more than any mind map application. There is a fairly big learning curve to access all the power, though. (And part of learning curve is not just in learning features, but in learning how to organize your data so you can use features to access, process, and view it in the most helpful ways).

Also, Emacs (and thus Org) do a good job of handling colors, fonts, diagrams, images (can be displayed in Emacs buffer and hidden when node collapses), web and file links (can immediately open in Emacs buffer and/or separate app), there are extensions that allow you to quickly/automatically insert external links into org documents, etc.