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

201–210 of 238 posts

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#201

Post by kazinator »

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…

Why would you commit important work to some online service?

When I visit evernote.com, I see the obvious fails: "sign up", "log in".

You gotta own the data, so that no matter how bad the program turns out to be, you have some a nice local file sitting on your hard drive from which you can ferret it all out somehow.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

taeric wrote: post #186
TeMPOraL wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm thinking of the middle-sized use cases. A table with couple hundred to couple thousand rows. Small enough that you can load it into Emacs without a performance penalty, but too large to pivot by hand. Personal and freelance business budgeting come to mind.

However, at this point I'm OK with shelling out to external tool for data wrangling.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#203

Post by tin7in »

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…

Just curious, what is the org mode alternative for the average knowledge worker?

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#204

Post by alessivs »

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…

> 4) I like variable width fonts, and variable width fonts don't seem to work with various bits of org mode (for example tables)

Same. I use mixed-pitch[1], a package on MELPA[2]

  M-x package-install mixed-pitch
will take care of Org tables and more. Doesn't attack the problem minimally, but comes with sensible choices; it's been basically a drop-in-and-forget activation snippet.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/jabranham/mixed-pitch

[2]: https://melpa.org/#/mixed-pitch

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#205

Post by choma »

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…

So... do you prefer the (only 234kb) plain text [1] version?

[1]: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.org

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#206

Post by eointierney »

ssivark wrote: post #161
golem14 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Syncthing?

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#207

Post by alessivs »

jasode wrote: post #72
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…

>, 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…

> by linking to .xlsx and .docx files but I reorganize my folder structures too often to make such file links stable.

Linking implies too many manual operations to keep things tidy when moving headings around. Try Org attachments[1].

- Basically, a heading has an attachment directory, whose name is by default generated by Org, and optionally inherited from some level in the outline hierarchy.

- Any attachment is represented by a heading with the :ATTACH: tag and an ID in the :ID: property of its drawer. Actual files can be e.g. copied, moved, or symlinked.

- Attachment directories, the :ATTACH: tag and :ID: property are conveniently added by one of the attach commands, but can also be customized (`org-attach' is the dispatcher, bound by default to ).

- For a given heading, run a command (conveniently, from the dispatcher) to visit the attachment directory for the heading from the configured file browser or Dired: and , respectively.

If it makes sense to move attachments when moving headings around, or when otherwise adding files externally to the attachment directory, there is `org-attach-sync' ():

  Synchronize the current task with its attachment directory, in case you added attachments yourself.
[1]: https://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#209

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

I've actually found, that for me org mode spreadsheets (table with formulas) make a lot of sense and I like having them together with all other stuff I put in an org mode file. I appreciate a lot, that it is still all plain text.

Once one gets the hang of using those spreadsheets and has written oneself a few examples, from which one can always copy or look things up, I think they are pretty amazing. Perhaps this is exactly the time you do not wish to spend on it, which is fine. Just saying, that for many purposes those spreadsheets work very well. There is after all GNU Calc behind them and if you want a complete programming language in form of Elisp as well. Power they do not lack, that is for sure.

Post reply on HN