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Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

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Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#141

Post by michaericalribo »

rgoulter wrote: post #55
michaericalribo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. The markup is just markdown, modulo a few conventions. The power of org mode is manipulating the data / text / content you have written and marked up

> In short: org mode is software that sits on top of the markup language, and lets you interact in sophisticated, semantic ways with the information in a file. As one example of this, org mode makes it easy to collapse/expand the content of a task.

That’s a good point—the software provides new types of UI, too! I had been thinking about rearranging text and org-capture, but you’re right that another excellent feature is the ability to view and interact with text fluidly and easily

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#142

Post by erikcw »

darau1 wrote: post #85
LandR wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In org-mode I can stop and start time running against a task and when I'm done get a breakdown of the total time spent on that task. I can close tasks and it automatically update when I closed them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through what state a task is in. e.g. TODO, DONE, BLOCKED etc. I can assign types to the task, and update these with a few simple keyboard shortcuts. If I have a list of tasks, e.g. T…

Can I use org-mode without emacs?

Organice[0] is one option. Works well on mobile also.

[0] https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#143

Post by golem14 »

ssivark wrote: post #136
matwood wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are now several solutions for org-mode on mobile. Organice, beorg, org-web, Orgzly etc.

They are all very nice. I really only need to capture new things on mobile for the most part, so my needs are minimal. What holds me back, however, is not supporting Google Drive for synchronization, as I use that anyway. As is, I would have to use another service like dropbox to sync mobile edits back.

Wait - I see that org-web says it does sync with Google drive, so I will try that out. Seems like I can use it by self hosting and not requiring giving google credentials out to some scary startupm (or large corporate entity I don't want to trust either).

Thanks for the tip!

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#144

Post by gjvc »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #120
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…

for those of us who are working to improve our ability to use org & lisp+emacs this is incredibly helpful.

You are welcome, mr_spothawk. This was exactly my intention in posting it.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

groby_b wrote: post #131
purerandomness wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if needed, we'll migrate to it. Meanwhile, any SaaS-du-jour that actually has data export does the job right now. I'm more interested in moving forward than in noodling on a system that, once it will be completed, will maybe help me make progress on my actual goals. They also don't give me RSI, which is a welcome change from emacs.

Just remember that, just like you don't actually have a backup until you successfully restore a system from it, the SaaS-du-jour doesn't actually have data export until you use it and import it somewhere, and verify all the data you care about survived the transition.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#146

Post by TeMPOraL »

taeric wrote: post #94
jasode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I use MS Excel features like pivot tables and MS Word graphics features like drawing arrows as overlays on top of screenshots to annotate them. The other limitation of out-of-the-box Org Mode "plain text" architecture is that it limits collaboration of letting other users edit my file because fine-grain locking is not as straightforward as with a db file like SQLite. My "master todo list" is easier to manage…

These are actually not that hard to do in org-mode, if you are willing to use babel and push the pivot out to something like pandas. :D That said, no, I don't actually think it is a replacement for spreadsheets. Especially not if you are already fluent in them.

Come to think of it, someone should write pivot tables for Emacs. Could be an alternate mode for opening CSV files (which then could also be used when editing code snippets in Org Mode).

(EDIT: In the meantime, I guess you could shell out to https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/manual/datamash.html.)

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#147

Post by sdwisely »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #79
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…

A few simple observations: - the venn diagram of people using emacs and using org-mode seems to largely overlap. That makes it impractical in non emacs heavy environments (aka. the wider industry). - tooling outside of emacs is mostly not there. - org mode is a basically similar to other wiki dialects with similar syntax, limitations, tooling, etc. Other than the (emacs) tooling, I don't see a strong reason for prefe…

Yep, it's close to how I see it.

org-mode is great tool for emacs as an environment. If the idea of having such a tool so close so tied into how you're working then it's the best tool I know of.

If you just want a markdown-ish outliner you can probably get that workflow elsewhere.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#148

Post by tra3 »

amake wrote: post #114

I take all my work notes in org-mode and had a hard time viewing them on my iPad, so I made a cross-platform mobile reader app: https://orgro.org (It's FOSS but available on the App Store and Google Play for convenience. It will be available on F-Droid soon as well.)

It'd be great if there's was a trial option.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#149

Post by skosch »

lodi wrote: post #97
jasode wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, org-mode eliminates the risk of hitting any sort of barrier Ultimately, it depends on the type of user but the "barrier" may be that it's plain text . So Org Mode's data format as a desirable selling point is also its ceiling of functionality. Yes, I store 90% of my notes in plain text. But I also store some programming notes in MS Excel because I need a datagrid as UI with dynamic calculations. I store some proje…

Actually org mode can do all of those things: * Recalculate formulas a la excel: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro... * Actually you can go way further than cloning basic excel functionality. For example, you can write inline code to generate or retrieve some data, feed that into a graphing program, and then inline the resulting chart back into the org file. https://orgmode.org/worg/org-con…

Just because it's possible in theory doesn't make it a good idea. In org-mode, anything that isn't plaintext is quite painful to set up and to maintain, at least until you've memorized two dozen arcane key chords. I would love for Emacs to get a Notion-like UI (still with plaintext underneath obviously) one day but until then, I'm okay with people using the best tool for the job, which isn't a text editor.

(I'm an enthusiastic org-mode user, by the way.)

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#150

Post by ramraj07 »

Syzygies wrote: post #90

Starting in 2005, I've been keeping dated text files in a Log folder, organized by year and month. Anytime I need digital "scrap paper" I make sure I keep it. If I need to save files, I open instead a dated log folder. There's a critical optimization problem here the young often get wrong. One needs to "Huffman code" the work put into organizing on entry, versus the work later in retrieving. For example, I save physi…

Regarding physical hoarding of bills, you should consider investing in a scansnap scanner - you can throw paper that's barely organized into a pile and it'll scan both sides into fully ocr'ed beautifully corrected duplex PDFs. Can't imagine life without it anymore!
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