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Worg, the Org-Mode Community

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Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#51

Post by npsimons »

vox_mollis wrote: post #32

Many comments here are claiming that org-mode is a "life changer", without qualification. I'm curious, what, specifically, has it changed about your life?

Some of us OCD types just like having so much detail, which you can get with org. Need to track hours for billing? Org can do that. Need to be able to capture notes/tasks at a moments notice with hyperrefs back to what you were doing and what file you were in? Org can do that. Need to build new habit(s)? Org can help with that.

If nothing else, org helps me to not forget to do things, and also to capture every idea that comes my way. Sure, a lot get thrown out, but at least I can track them and make a conscious decision about abandoning them. Also, I might have been as, or even more, productive before I started using org. But I don't know because I wasn't tracking and quantifying it. Now I can see at the end of the day (reviews and planning supported by org) what I've accomplished and what's left to do.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#52

Post by krylon »

Splines wrote: post #48
krylon wrote: post #29

I am currently beginning to use org-mode to keep track of what I do at work. When my boss comes into the office on Friday afternoon and asks us what we did all week, I usually have a hard time remembering what I did on Monday or Tuesday. Having a record of that will hopefully help. Once I have gotten into the habit of writing down what I did, I hope to also use it for time-tracking, so I can also tell my boss that I…

FWIW, I use OneNote to do this. One section per month, and then a tab for every week. I put high level tasks under each week and put my notes in as appropriate. I tried using org-mode but it took too much time to learn when the alternative I had on hand (OneNote) was much easier to learn. Yes, I don't get the same feature set with org-mode, but all I wanted was a work journal.

As much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft Office, OneNote is a real pleasure to use. If I had it on my laptop, I might have used it for this purpose, too.

But, alas, my laptop has Office 2007 Pro, which does come with Access (which I have no use for), but without OneNote (I think it was still a separate product back then). IMHO MS Office has mostly gotten worse and worse with each release following 2007, but I really do envy my coworkers who have OneNote on their machines (although few actually use it).

For somebody not wanting to dive into the complexities of org-mode, OneNote is - depending on the platform - a great alternative. Probably, OneNote can do things org-mode cannot, and vice versa. But they address similar scenarios.

I for one have already invested heavily into becoming proficient with emacs, have it open all the time, anyway, so spending time making emacs do even more things for me seems like a good investment at this point.

Also, the result might be slightly confusing but it still is a plain text file that can be read with any text editor.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#53

Post by krylon »

chris_st wrote: post #30
krylon wrote: post #29

I am currently beginning to use org-mode to keep track of what I do at work. When my boss comes into the office on Friday afternoon and asks us what we did all week, I usually have a hard time remembering what I did on Monday or Tuesday. Having a record of that will hopefully help. Once I have gotten into the habit of writing down what I did, I hope to also use it for time-tracking, so I can also tell my boss that I…

I wrote a pretty simple web app to do just this -- write down what I did, per project or task, and how long I worked on it. I eventually gave up on keeping track of the time, as I found I didn't really need it. It's really useful, not only on weekly staff meetings, but in our (SIGH...) yearly appraisals. I didn't know about org-mode at the time...

There are plenty of software projects, both FLOSS and proprietaty that aim to support people in this, mainly because many, many people need to keep track of their time.

On the other hand, each person's workflow and environment is different, so there probably is no one-size-fits-all solution for this sort of thing.

So, given that it is not an excessively complex problem, rolling your own is perfectly fine, I think. (Probably fun, too.)

But in my case, learning org-mode was faster than rolling my own. And of course, one doesn't need to use every bell and whistle.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#54

Post by vox_mollis »

e19293001 wrote: post #38
vox_mollis wrote: post #32

Many comments here are claiming that org-mode is a "life changer", without qualification. I'm curious, what, specifically, has it changed about your life?

The qualification is not fake. To quote from this tutorial[0], the author says: I have been using org-mode as my personal information manager for years now. I started small with just the default TODO and DONE keywords. I added small changes to my workflow and over time it evolved into what is described by this document. I still change my workflow and try new things regularly. This document describes mature workflows…

Thanks. Trying it out is now on my (non-org-mode) todo list. :)

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#55

Post by tmalsburg2 »

bachmeier wrote: post #20

I use org-mode almost every day, and I think it's great, but I also think it's fair to point out what I see as its biggest disadvantage. It changes. And by that I mean the developers don't care at all about breakage. This has caused countless problems for me over the years in two ways: i. You better be using exactly the same org-mode version on all of your computers, because there is no concept of backward compatibil…

I love org-mode but yes, some of its developers do not care at all about users. I'm really afraid of updating org-mode because every time I do a lot of things break. Since I use org for my work, this can have very unpleasant consequences.

Another problem is that org-mode diverges more and more from central priciples that made Emacs so successful. Emacs is primarily a text editor, but org is adopting more and more principles of graphical UIs. For example, when I press enter on a tag attached to a heading, I would expects that this inserts a newline character at the position of the cursor, but no, the org developers think that I don't really want a new line when I press enter at this position, and instead the cursor just moves to the next line. WTF!

Yet another problem is the way in which design decision are made. There is rarely agreement about new features on the mailing list, and instead of finding a common ground, the adopted solution is all to often to make the feature in question configurable. This leads to an explosion of configuration options and it's easy to imaging how this can ruin a code base. Testing becomes a nightmare and documentation, too.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#56

Post by markc »

I'm not a power user, but use Org every day. My init.el even drops me into my org todo list. Top uses:

Engineering notebook. Key combo calls org-journal-entry which I found on the web. It brings up a time-stamped narrowed buffer. I use this in every meeting where note-taking occurs. TODOs can be recorded directly in the journal and can be merged with other TODOs in agenda mode.

Linking. C-c C-l creates a nice looking hyperlink. I link to URLs, local files of all kinds (office, pdf, jpg, etc), or org tags. E.g. I keep a list of restaurants I want to try. I tag by cuisine type, and link to the restaurant's web page. Cycling to DONE time-stamps the entry so I know when I visited. I keep track of books-to-read in a similar way.

Other TODOs. I set the mode cycling to TODO -> IN PROGRESS -> WAITING -> DEFERRED -> CANCELLED -> DONE so I can handle a wide varieties of task outcomes. Also timestamped.

Spreadsheets. Mostly when I have a bunch of data already in a buffer and want to do some quick calculations. Quicker than firing up a real spreadsheet, though it's pretty limited.

HTML generation. Making pretty outlines/notes from my org files.

Gnu-pg. Seamless encrypt/decrypt of sensitive data.

Stuff I tried but mostly stopped using:

Org-babel. It was neat to run Clojure, Python, Ruby, and shell all from one file, pipe data between them, and make pretty tex output from it all. But day to day I rarely need that sort of power.

Calendar. I tried keeping all my recurring and one-time appointments in org. Problem is, I'm forced by work to live in Outlook, so keeping 2 calendars is not worth it.

Agenda. I used to view my agenda to merge everything in todos and calendar. I tend not to use agenda much any more.

TBH, I don't really have the discipline to rigorously update my TODOs all the time. Even so, I'd feel a little lost with out org. As with any todo system it declutters your head. When I realize there's something I should do, I need to get it out of my head into org, else I feel anxious that I'll forget it. Hardly matters that I only wind up doing 1/3 of them. I also rely on it for backup and sync of important notes, todos, etc. (via dropbox).

You'll get out of it what you put into it, but even with a few core uses (for me, notes, todos, and linking) it can quickly become indispensable.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#57

Post by jamessb »

jmnicolas wrote: post #27
kev6168 wrote: post #11

Genuine question: how does Org-Mode handle mindmap style information management? By "mindmap" I mean applications such as Freemind, Xmind, etc.? I recently started to use Xmind after years of Vimoutliner. Both the upsides and downsides are huge for me. For text based approach such as Vim, it is great in fast input, text manipulations, complex searches, integrate with other tools, portability, etc. But on the other ha…

Well an outliner is really faster but sucks at showing the big picture. A graphical mindmapper is slower but is great when you want an overview. Ultimately you would need a combination of both, one where you create your outline and it's rendered as a visual mindmap. I'm not aware of any software that does that though.

There's a (Mac only) notetaking program called Curio with many features, one of which is the ability to convert an outline (which it calls a 'list') to a mind-map or vice-versa: http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/

Edit: Also, if you have an outline as plain text with tabs for indentation, you can just paste it into FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Import_and_ex...)

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#58

Post by luxpir »

npsimons wrote: post #47
luxpir wrote: post #41

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…

> 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…

Your point could still partially apply to vim. But my main train of thought on reading this, as well as the sample configs offered above[0], is that it really is much too complex for my needs.

The amount of configuration and maintenance required, shuffling todo items around, filing, refiling - even the person whose setup is mentioned elsewhere[0] admits he had 373 tasks at that time - that doesn't sound organised to me!

I'll most likely stick to developing my 'plaintext vertical kanban' system, unless I dabble with the vim clone of org-mode. I do however get the ethos of the thing, and happily encourage it. I saw a fun quote at the top of one of today's HN front page articles:

Laziness is a virtue as it “makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.”

— Larry Wall, founder of Perl

[0] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

---

PS - slightly off topic, but saw in another comment here you still use org-mode on an N900 - I need to de-brick mine, but that involves splitting a USB cable and soldering it onto the test pads under the battery. It lasted for 5 years, performing brilliantly, and I was just about to put the easychroot Debian back on when disaster struck.

With that phone/device I had an SSH shortcut on the desktop to my various servers and also ran syncthing on it directly, barely affecting battery life, to keep phone and laptop notes in sync. I can still do most of that on the Ubuntu phone, but can't help feeling restricted. Sure I can enable write access to the system files, but then I forego the updates. Not ideal.

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#59

Post by luxpir »

KnightHawk3 wrote: post #5

As a Vim user, I wish I could have something like what I have heard of Org-Mode for Vim / Neovim. At the moment I just have a folder of Markdown files that I compile with gitit, it doesn't seem as nice though.

Perhaps worth a test, I haven't tried it yet but:

https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

Re: Worg, the Org-Mode Community

#60

Post by girzel »

jmnicolas wrote: post #27
kev6168 wrote: post #11

Genuine question: how does Org-Mode handle mindmap style information management? By "mindmap" I mean applications such as Freemind, Xmind, etc.? I recently started to use Xmind after years of Vimoutliner. Both the upsides and downsides are huge for me. For text based approach such as Vim, it is great in fast input, text manipulations, complex searches, integrate with other tools, portability, etc. But on the other ha…

Well an outliner is really faster but sucks at showing the big picture. A graphical mindmapper is slower but is great when you want an overview. Ultimately you would need a combination of both, one where you create your outline and it's rendered as a visual mindmap. I'm not aware of any software that does that though.

There's another (Mac-only) bit of software called Tinderbox. I'm a die-hard Org user -- use it every day, and have written quite a bit of software on top of it. Tinderbox is the only program that occasionally makes me regret committing to Emacs/Org.
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