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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

#181

Post by nextos »

kohtatsu wrote: post #163
nextos wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, I am not aware of any.

Perhaps some articles and the book in https://www.masteringemacs.org/.

At some point, I would like to write an introduction to Emacs, Org, Notmuch and friends. Their docs are great if you have been using Emacs for a long time. But if you are a newcomer, the learning curve is really steep. And it shouldn't be like that. At their core all these are conceptually simple, easy to understand, and to hack.

Emacs and friends are IMHO really worth investing time into due to the Lindy effect. They will be around when most of the current software is gone. Besides, a text-mode Lisp VM (which is what Emacs is), makes your life as a developer much more enjoyable.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#182

Post by quazar »

christiansakai wrote: post #162

I use vim, so what is my alternative? Not gonna learn emacs for the sake of org mode.

You should try. I also was a loyal vim user, but OrgMode was so wonderful I switched to two-editor solution. Emacs for OrgMode and vim for everything else.

Remember, that you don't actually have to learn Emacs, like you had to learn vim to use it. It's just an ordinary text-editor, no huge upfront time investment is needed, especially if all you are after is OrgMode.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#183

Post by im3w1l »

tchalla wrote: post #33
spaniard89277 wrote: post #2

It looks like some people want to spend more time organizing their life than living their life. IDK man, I already need some willpower to use Trello and looks far easier.

XKCD : Is it Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/

This assumes that there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at all. In my experience foss tools are often pushed insincerely by activists.

For instance when I asked about accessing org from a phone, this person told me he sshed in and accessed it using a phone terminal emulator.

Yeah... No... That's not my ideal way to organize my life.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#184

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

I honestly tried to use org-mode tables and formulas to record and process student grades and it was a huge failure. I am very comfortable with emacs, but this particular aspect of org-mode took 10x the time a simple spreadsheet software would have taken. And I don't see this time decreasing with repeated usage.

I am back to using org-mode for other stuff.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#185

Post by taylorlunt »

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.

There are lots of features I don't use in org. In fact, in the beginning I only used the most basic feature of keeping a foldable hierarchical text file of notes, which is basically the same thing as your Notes files, but with some nice structure editing and folding keybindings built in. But I have been slowly integrating org features into my system when I think they would be useful to me.

First I started scheduling things. With org, you can schedule items and have them show up in your agenda regardless of what org file they are in. Org agenda gives you an outline of your week, and your current day, and it says how many days you have left until certain items are due. This has replaced my calendar, and feels superior to a calendar to me.

Then I started using org-drill, which lets you drill org notes, emulating the spaced-repetition behavior of Anki. You could just use Anki, but it's nice to have all of your personal information management in one place, and have it editable from your text editor.

I've also started using hyperlinks to make links between my org files and also to any other file on my computer, to web URLs, to executing a script, to mailto links... This has been helpful.

I still don't use plenty of features, like the literate programming stuff, tables, tags, capture, etc. But I don't need to. They're there for me if I feel they would be helpful. But they're invisible to me otherwise. Org isn't "insanely complicated" because it's mostly just a text file, and the features are there for you to use if you need them, but there's no cluttered UI that actually adds any complexity.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#186

Post by taeric »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #146
taeric wrote: 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. )

I'm not sure what you are describing. Note that doing this with python and org is already pretty easy. Or R. No, you don't fully open the csv in org. But, that usually seems a feature. The firehose that is large csv is typically best as a related file.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#187

Post by samatman »

CJefferson wrote: post #96
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…

Here were my "sunk costs" of org-mode. 1) org-mode makes a bad spreadsheet 2) No good Android interface, Orgzly is OK, but doesn't do advanced features and often crashed for me. 3) Despite lots of trying, I couldn't get "into" using the Emacs shortcut keys, which are different to every other application on Windows. 4) I like variable width fonts, and variable width fonts don't seem to work with various bits of org mo…

It should be possible to use monospaced fonts only for tables.

They're syntax highlighted in a distinct way and that should be all you need.

This is the fundamental tradeoff of emacs, basically: it's nearly always possible to get exactly what you want, in exchange for an unreasonable amount of effort.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#188

Post by d0mine »

skosch wrote: post #149
lodi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

In practice, I've used org tables (as a minor mode) even before I've started to use org mode regularly -- so much I've liked it (use case: manual entry of smal tables with occasional formulas)

I find inline pictures very helpful when Org Babel is used as analog of Jupyter notebooks (plantuml diagrams, pandas plots).

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#189

Post by readme »

nurbl wrote: post #44
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…

The article is pretty clearly written for someone who is already an emacs+org user. I guess it was posted mostly as a teaser of what can be done with it. The "plain text" catch phrase is not baseless, though. One of the best things about org mode is that there really is a simple and intuitive markup format at its core. Most users probably only ever use the "outliner" features, which are pretty obvious. But once you'r…

Every time I see something about org mode it makes me want to learn emacs, but I am very used to vim. This one is especially tempting, though.
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