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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Organice does support Google Drive, Dropbox and WebDAV. (Organice is a fork of org-web)

More fundamentally, if you (anyone reading) can think of any easily usable way to sync files between devices, I think it might not be too hard to get Organice/etc. to support that as yet another backend.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#163
post #99

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.

Besides, Org is not complicated. It has lots of features, but at its core it's just a plain text outliner with hyperlinks, keywords and timestamps. Org is like Common Lisp in many ways. It offers you lots of paradigms to build your own workflows, but you don't need to use or understand them initially. An it might suffer from the same PR problem Emacs has. Manuals, tutorials and guides throw all features at once witho…

Would really appreciate links to guides that don't suffer from this.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#165
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. )

https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/manual/datamash.html Fixed link

On the topic of commandline spreadsheets; I'm a huge fan of sc(1), a cute curses-based spreadsheet calculator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#167

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…

> That makes it impractical in non emacs heavy environments (aka. the wider industry).

Depends. It's very practical if you're an independent contractor. I run my contracting from Emacs, including tracking tasks, time, generating invoices and processing documents. The main extra integration I have is LaTeX, which I use to generate nice PDFs to send to customers.

Before, as a salaried employee, I still used it for task management and time tracking - regular software used for that purpose (e.g. Jira) is nowhere near ergonomic enough to make detailed TODO lists, and store notes and code samples along with them. Not to mention, it's not the kind of stuff you'd want to spam on public time/task tracker systems. So Org Mode works really great as a private, more detailed tracking/noting system. Bonus points if you develop with Emacs too, as then you can achieve nice synergy (e.g. evaluating code snippets straight from the notes).

> 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 preferring it.

That's only partly true. Org's markup language is pretty similar to Markdown. But it's the tooling - the Org Mode - that makes it unique, and mostly unusable outside of Emacs. Within Org language, like TODO markers, priorities, drawers, header options, code block parameters, etc. serve as hooks for the tooling, and this is what lets you turn an .org document from a glorified Markdown into a fully-featured outliner/task tracker/time tracker/spreadsheet/literate programming environment.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#168
I love the concepts and workflow that org-mode, as well at surrounding extensions, promote. What I rue, however, is how tightly it is married to Emacs. vim extensions for it aren't up to the same level yet, and the mobile apps for org-mode are quite lacking, after trying them.

It just seems like it has so much promise, and people have done a lot of interesting things with it, but it's clouded behind this learning curve and toolchain.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#169

I like the idea of Org Mode, but for me it is just a painful to use. Vscode with the "Markdown All in One" does everything I could possibly need. It is still plain text and it should be portable to any tool that can display markdown files. The biggest draw is the keyboard shortcuts are far less complicated and more ergonomic (though perhaps less powerful than emacs, but that is fine with me). edit: Also interestingly…

Yeah, unfortunately, while Emacs on Windows works, it kind of feels like a fish pulled out of the water. What I do when I work on Windows machines is build and launch Emacs under WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), and use an X Server on the Windows side (VcXsrv) to get a GUI window.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#170
My life is now organized just in time to die of old age learning this system. I'm the most organized dead-guy I guess.

When my scroll bar turns into a tiny square in the top right of the window for something as trivial as a note-taking system I nope right out of there.

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