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Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

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Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#81

Post by wodenokoto »

amasad wrote: post #67
atemerev wrote: post #62

Tried to switch to vim/Emacs repeatedly for more than 10 years, never understood the reason of cryptic commands and shortcuts, that was OK 25 years ago, but since then, keyboards got, say, _arrow keys_. Alt-F is "forward one word"? OK, can be memorized, but there is Alt-right arrow for everything else, much more intuitive. UI matters. Shortcuts and their relationships are part of the UI, and it's horrible for Emacs.…

Arrow keys are the worst ergonomically. You need to be able to stay as close as possible to the home position. When my RSI got really bad I noticed how bad it can be to keep reaching for the arrow keys.

To me the most painful position by far is all fingers on home position.

If you ask a physical therapist what is the best way to sit on a chair they will say it is to switch position constantly. I'm not buying that it is opposite for a keyboard.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#82

Post by catnaroek »

pzone wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the question for org-mode - that's the question of using digital vs. physical for note taking. And the answer probably depends on person. For me, I went through everything. I've been switching around between paper and digital. I did GTD on paper, did Bullet Journal, and on the computer side I went through Workflowy, OneNote, using Outlook for tasks and some other things too. I eventually gravitated towards…

Yeah. Comparing org-mode to handwritten notes? You can grep through your notes, quickly refile, integrate with other software, use hyperlinks, and synchronize over multiple devices. But the same is true of onenote or evernote.

I can draw arbitrary diagrams and pictures on my notebook. I can write using arbitrarily big or small letters. I can write fancy formulas and even make up my own notations on the fly. I can use pens of different colors, and let the colors highlight the relationships between ideas. And I don't need to worry about “synchronization”, because I always carry my notebook with me. It's not all downsides for handwritten notes.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#84

Post by MarcScott »

preek wrote: post #74
MarcScott wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to keep lots of stuff in Evernote, and when I switched to org-mode, I did an HTML export from Evernote and then wrote an awful Python script to convert the HTML to org-mode. I'm pretty sure all the binary data appears as links in the exported html.

Would you be so kind as to share this Python script? I'd be happy to give it a shot^^

Sorry, not got it any more. It was a one-time use thing as once I was done with Evernote, I was done for good. It was pretty specific to my use case anyway - as most of the content was tabulated student data.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#85

Post by daniel-cussen »

pzone wrote: post #70
hashkb wrote: post #5

I bet org mode is one of the most posted things on HN. It has passionate users. I'm not one of them.

My theory is that HN loves Emacs because HN loves Lisp.

I'm an anecdatum that did, in fact, learn Emacs b/c of Lisp. B/c of HN. B/c of PG...and strangely enough, I've been working on my emacs skillz all day.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#86

Post by MarcScott »

Most comments here seem to focus on the notes and GTD side of org-mode.

For me, org-mode is my go to markup language. So much so that I now find writing in Markdown to be almost painful. A few of my favourite features are:

- Tables are amazingly easy in org-mode, with spreadsheet features thrown in as well.

- Code snippets can be written in their own major mode, giving me syntax highlighting, auto completion and the ability to run the code and embed the output into the markup.

- Local links autocomplete, so I don't worry about breaking them with typos.

- I can export to HTML, Markdown, ODF or PDF.

- GitHub supports org-mode Readmes

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

pzone wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the question for org-mode - that's the question of using digital vs. physical for note taking. And the answer probably depends on person. For me, I went through everything. I've been switching around between paper and digital. I did GTD on paper, did Bullet Journal, and on the computer side I went through Workflowy, OneNote, using Outlook for tasks and some other things too. I eventually gravitated towards…

Yeah. Comparing org-mode to handwritten notes? You can grep through your notes, quickly refile, integrate with other software, use hyperlinks, and synchronize over multiple devices. But the same is true of onenote or evernote.

> But the same is true of onenote or evernote.

Not really. With OneNote and evernote you can't (literally) grep through your notes (yay cloud storage, the only thing worse than propertiary formats). They don't integrate all that well with other software, and you can't refile quickly. Way too much clicking in both to do even simplest of tasks, compared to Emacs-powered org-mode, where everything is keyboard driven, and you can do things affecting multiple files simultaneously from the agenda buffer.

About the only places where OneNote & Evernote beat org-mode is the convenience of embedding rich media in notes (in org-mode you have to store files separately and embed links, though there are ways to make e.g. linked images to display inline) and mobile interface. Mobile apps for interaction with org-mode are sadly subpar at the moment.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#88

Post by Terr_ »

Tomte wrote: post #37

"plus it's completely platform agnostic and future proof, because it's just text" This always irks me a bit. Being text doesn't mean that there is no file format and internal semantics to it. Sure, it's easy to hack together some transformation in Perl, but "plus it's completely platform agnostic and future proof, because it's just binary" would be correct, as well. As long as the format is documented.

Hmm, what about "decipherable"?

Sure, you might lose runtime access to the data if some ancient library goes poof, but the barriers/prereqs for re-implementing that code from scratch are minimal.

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#89

Post by dragandj »

atemerev wrote: post #77
amasad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrow keys are the worst ergonomically. You need to be able to stay as close as possible to the home position. When my RSI got really bad I noticed how bad it can be to keep reaching for the arrow keys.

I don't feel uncomfortable when reaching for the arrow keys with my right hand. But I _do_ feel very uncomfortable when I press wrong navigation key in Vim (was it h or j? My fingers don't _feel_ it), and it's really uncomfortable reaching for Ctrl for anything in Emacs, especially Ctrl-B — now _this_ is RSI-prone).

That's why you could remap ctrl and put it just next to SPACE. Speaking of that, I also remapped Shift to space, and now I use space for both shift and space (sounds crazy, but it is ergonomically perfect!).

Re: Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

#90

Post by amasad »

wodenokoto wrote: post #81
amasad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrow keys are the worst ergonomically. You need to be able to stay as close as possible to the home position. When my RSI got really bad I noticed how bad it can be to keep reaching for the arrow keys.

To me the most painful position by far is all fingers on home position. If you ask a physical therapist what is the best way to sit on a chair they will say it is to switch position constantly. I'm not buying that it is opposite for a keyboard.

Moving around will help blood flow and will get you to release the static contraction (or switch muscles). That affects your forearm, wrists etc and I don't think has anything to do with your fingers.

For me, keeping at the home position limits wrist contortions that I associated with my increased pain.

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