Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

doc.norang.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 238 posts

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#121

Post by mr_spothawk »

spekcular wrote: post #93
contravariant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always cua-mode if you want something more compatible with usual text editors. No telling what will happen for any other Ctrl,Alt shortcuts, but most regular keys should work as expected. And there's always M-x to just search a command (which will also tell you the hotkey, if any).

Besides "yank," calling alt "Meta" is another silly thing, too. And yes, I'm aware of the reasons. It's still silly in 2020, as was discussed in the recent HN topic on why Emacs isn't attracting new users.

if you happen to remember the headline title on that, i'd be interested to read about why Emacs isn't attracting new users.

in the last year i know two new developers who have written their own emacs configs.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#122

Post by taeric »

slightwinder wrote: post #110
monsieurbanana wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm Chrome in emacs? No problem. Excel on linux on emacs? No problem, just run Excel on Windows on VirtualBox on emacs. (in case you missed it from my first comment, I'm being facetious)

That's not "in emacs". Still seperate process and environment and limited to no integration into emacs. If you do stuff like this, at least use https://github.com/manateelazycat/emacs-application-framewor... for some better level of integration. Though, still seperate and limited.

I think they were being completely facetious. That said, I also think requiring it be "in process" is unnecessary. One of the most powerful features of org is babel, which clearly pushes out the execution to the external tools.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#123

Post by diffeomorphism »

pkalinowski wrote: post #23

It looks insanely complicated for no reason. Why do such super organisation, where you have great search at your disposal? I just have everything inside Notes folder with subfolders if any project is getting bigger. Anytime I want to look for something, I just do global text search for the whole Notes folder.

Because "great search" is not even close to good enough and handles only a fraction of the features.

This is like saying that excel is insanely complicated for no reason, when pen and paper exist. If this is all you need, great, but if it is not then the comparison does not even make sense.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#124

Post by mr_spothawk »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #66

I surprised myself when I stopped using org-mode when I "retired" (ha!) March 2019. At my last on-site job, I had to juggle managing a small deep learning team, work on 100+ US patents, and all of my own technical work and research. Org-mode was perfect to keep everything organized. Now, I rely heavily on Apple Notes (this required discovering a little app that exports the notes for backup, and also realizing that I…

can you recommend any ways for me (a low-mid developer trying to improve my skills with e.g. tmux & mosh) to get access to the brains of mature/retiring expert level engineers? mostly i'm interested in learning these sorts of productivity patterns.

unfortunately, i don't work closely with any developers. i took a job a couple years ago in order to apprentice under a linux guru, but unfortunately he left the company 2 days before i started. i was fortunate to learn a lot from the remaining team before the company shuttered 8 months later.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#125

Post by mr_spothawk »

olivierestsage wrote: post #109

YMMV, but Emacs and Org Mode have made my life finally seem manageable after basically a lifetime of struggling to keep track of everything. If that sounds like you, it might be worth your time to try.

would you be willing to put up a few screenshare videos describing your workflow?

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#126

Post by teataster »

dsabanin wrote: post #38
birracerveza wrote: post #3

Org Mode keeps being pushed again and again, but honestly this title is one of the boldest claims I've seen about it. Just look at the document. It's a 400+kb HTML page of Emacs configurations, keybindings and other stuff that makes absolutely no sense unless you've been an avid Emacs user for years. Where is the Plain Text here? I see nothing of the sort. Sure, the output might resemble Plain Text, but it's clearly…

I think it's a perfect excuse to procrastinate. You can spend months configuring Org Mode, tweaking and hacking away, instead of using something like Things, Todoist, or OmniFocus (or thousands more, whichever one you like best) and focusing on the things you should actually be doing and organizing. I've been guilty of that myself.

I have a pretty large emacs config. I wrote it over 4 years. I tend to figure out repetitive tasks on my workflow and code them to key bindings. It saves time in the end and it is quite lazy. I also get all crazy refactoring tasks at work, cause colleagues know I will write a little emacs script and have it done in no time. So 4 years of time "wasting" seem to be valuable for my employer and colleagues.

I use org cause I can write code in multiple languages as well as having my notes and thoughts on the process. Again colleagues like that I then share those as HTML. I like that is instant documentation. Trello and family don't do that.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#127

Post by slightwinder »

taeric wrote: post #122
slightwinder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "in emacs". Still seperate process and environment and limited to no integration into emacs. If you do stuff like this, at least use https://github.com/manateelazycat/emacs-application-framewor... for some better level of integration. Though, still seperate and limited.

I think they were being completely facetious. That said, I also think requiring it be "in process" is unnecessary. One of the most powerful features of org is babel, which clearly pushes out the execution to the external tools.

> That said, I also think requiring it be "in process" is unnecessary.

No, this is important for integration. Integration is the main benefit you have while using emacs.

> One of the most powerful features of org is babel, which clearly pushes out the execution to the external tools.

Yes, but it has very limited interaction with them. The whole interface is in emacs. Emacs is doing many of this embedded fire n' forget-style interactions. That doesn't make them richful.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#128

Post by h91wka »

m463 wrote: post #77
madballster wrote: post #49

I see a lot of comments arguing that it's not "worth it" to spend dozens of hours to "get into org-mode" when there are "intuitive tools" such as Evernote or Trello or Todoist etc. What some are missing is the fact that low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage. After (!) one has sunk thousands of hours into them. I used to keep my academic notes in Evernote and it turned into hell…

This sort of resonates with me. I use emacs extensively, but I started using omnifocus years ago and that is what I still use. The features for me are: just about perfect sync across devices. self-hosted data. enough sorting and prioritizing features. But I will say around ios 7 timeframe they drank the apple Koolaid and changed just about everything in the app - and most were meaningless look-and-feel changes. Just…

As a full time linux user I can't use OmniFocus anymore. But I tried it in the past, and to be honest, mastering it required no less time than I put into my unsophisticated org-mode setup.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#129

Post by matwood »

purerandomness wrote: post #69
madballster wrote: post #49

I see a lot of comments arguing that it's not "worth it" to spend dozens of hours to "get into org-mode" when there are "intuitive tools" such as Evernote or Trello or Todoist etc. What some are missing is the fact that low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage. After (!) one has sunk thousands of hours into them. I used to keep my academic notes in Evernote and it turned into hell…

Also, people forget that their favourite SaaS-du-jour probably won't be around after their "Incredible Journey" ends and there won't be a migration path, or it's going to cost too many hours to be worth it. Emacs will be here for us in the next decades, even well after our career ends, and then some.

I've tried org-mode a few times, but I just couldn't get over emacs and the mobile app situation.

For now I've settled on Apple Notes which works well with the iPad and pencil across all of my devices. I also use Drafts for longer form writing. The downside is that I'm trapped in Apple's ecosystem, but I'm already deeply there so I might as well embrace it.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#130

Post by indymike »

birracerveza wrote: post #3

Org Mode keeps being pushed again and again, but honestly this title is one of the boldest claims I've seen about it. Just look at the document. It's a 400+kb HTML page of Emacs configurations, keybindings and other stuff that makes absolutely no sense unless you've been an avid Emacs user for years. Where is the Plain Text here? I see nothing of the sort. Sure, the output might resemble Plain Text, but it's clearly…

Confession: 30 year emacs user here. Have been using org-mode since 2008 or so (I think the first org-mode shipped in 2003). So, why so many articles? Emacs is dwindling away. There are enough users, emacs will likely never die.

I think there are a lot of org-mode users that would like to see org-mode for VS Code (there are some starts) and other editors. Org-mode is really an extendable dsl for personal information. Source code (which is what you are calling the output) is interesting in that it looks like a semi-structured text file, and compiles to many output formats (pdf, HTML, spreadsheets, etc).

Post reply on HN