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

221–230 of 238 posts

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#221

Post by ChanderG »

readme wrote: post #189
nurbl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing evil-mode exists. That was my own path - started with using emacs just for orgmode, now fully shifted over.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#222

Post by CJefferson »

allarm wrote: post #216
CJefferson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1) org-mode makes a good spreadsheet 2) Not being Android user myself, I have only heard good things about Orgzly from Emacs people around. What features exactly are you missing? 3) you can use any keys you want with Emacs. I have my own setup that I am using along with the Vim key bindings/text objects. 4) pretty much everything else works well with fonts and colors; tables yeah, tend to keep simple formatting. Emac…

Thanks, I hope this will be useful for other people!

1) When I google for some advanced operations (like multi-column sort), the advice seemed to be export as CSV and do it in openoffice.

2) While orgzly is a good attempt, if you google around you will find lots of limitations (it's too long since I've used it), as it is a reimplementation of org-mode so can't hope to be feature complete.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#223

Post by sparkie »

im3w1l wrote: post #177
sparkie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few key binding collisions, but otherwise they can be used together.

So now you are telling a noob who just wants to get some task done to start resolving key binding collisions.

The noob probably won't even be aware of the collisions if they're a new emacs user. The org-mode keybindings will override the cua-mode bindings. Afaik, it's only shift+arrow keys.

A noob can pick up emacs, type M-x cua-mode M-x org-mode and have a simple to use outliner which recognizes most of the keyboard shortcuts they're familiar with.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#224

Post by bwbmr »

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…

Big mosh user here myself. How do you deal with tmux limiting window size to the lowest common denominator device? I usually run a little bash script manually to disconnect other tmux sessions whenever I switch devices, which gets annoying.

Also which app for Apple Notes exports do you use?

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#225

Post by im3w1l »

sparkie wrote: post #223
im3w1l wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you are telling a noob who just wants to get some task done to start resolving key binding collisions.

The noob probably won't even be aware of the collisions if they're a new emacs user. The org-mode keybindings will override the cua-mode bindings. Afaik, it's only shift+arrow keys. A noob can pick up emacs, type M-x cua-mode M-x org-mode and have a simple to use outliner which recognizes most of the keyboard shortcuts they're familiar with.

Ah fair enough then

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#226

Post by nmarriott »

bwbmr wrote: post #224
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…

Big mosh user here myself. How do you deal with tmux limiting window size to the lowest common denominator device? I usually run a little bash script manually to disconnect other tmux sessions whenever I switch devices, which gets annoying. Also which app for Apple Notes exports do you use?

tmux can be configured not to limit the window size since tmux 2.9, and it is the default since tmux 3.1.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#227

Post by kleiba »

groby_b wrote: post #220
kleiba wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with using alternative solutions, but your critique of Emacs is mostly FUD and a repetition of cliches. Your two points are: 1. Org-mode (or Emacs?) is not completed, by which you imply it is in some kind of premature state that it's not ready to use. like some kind of "version 0.2 beta, use at your own risk". Nothing is further from the truth. Org-mode is currently on stable release 9.3.6. It h…

I mostly refer to the fact that org-mode isn't a complete system - it lacks many integrations. It is, in every article I read, an excuse to faff about with configuring things. In fact that's pretty much the start of every org mode article - "here's how to change your config file" (There's nothing wrong with that - I totally enjoy it for some things. I just need a workflow now, not when I've put all the pieces togethe…

Fair enough, there's nothing wrong using something else if you've found something that works for you. But that is a different statement than what came across from your first post which was worded a bit more negatively, and sounded slightly like bashing (to me anyway).

Also note that my point about the remapping was this: I never had RSI issues with Emacs, so for me it actually works pretty much out of the box. If you experience certain problems, Emacs provides what it takes to adjust it to your specific needs. Can these other SaaS tools do that too?

It's great that not everyone has to use the same tool to get the job done. Variety rules.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#228

Post by brnt »

It's not the same, but I'm using a QOwnNotes based setup. It does document-tocs, images, and a git versioned history if you wish, and a freeform fs layout for your notes which are saved as plain markdown. If emacs is what's stopping you from using orgmode, QOwnNotes may be something for you.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#229

Post by amake »

tra3 wrote: post #148
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.

I wish the stores let you do that easily :(

If you're on Android then you can wait for F-Droid, or you can get an automatic refund from Google Play if you uninstall it shortly after purchase.

Otherwise you can always build and install from source, since it's FOSS.

Re: Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

#230

Post by dpbriggs »

throwaway286 wrote: post #196
dpbriggs wrote: post #84

Recent CS graduate here. Used org-mode for every assignment and report. Used it at every internship. Will be using it in my full-time work. Use it at work to automate pull-request bureaucracy and notes. Use it for design notes and render into other formats. It's the highest productivity format I have ever encountered, and we haven't even touched org-agenda.

How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests? Do you make the pull request inside emacs? Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch? Or something else?

Preface: I like very detailed pull-requests. For me this includes JIRA information and implementation notes. Most of my recent work has been backend API stuff, and org-babel/restclient [0] lets me do fast test-driven-development in the same file. These inputs / outputs are included in the PR render so it's easy to see what the API is doing.

> How do you use org-mode to automate pull-requests?

I have a script called 'new_jira $JIRA_NUMBER' which pulls relevant JIRA information from the REST API and generates an org-mode file. I do my work and list implementation details, gotchas, and generally narrate work done. Details are light for easy tickets, and heavy on complex ones. Finally, render it as markdown and copy/paste in the GitHub PR field.

I also include tips / tricks if it's not appropriate to comment directly in the code base. I come back and search for these later (knowledge base).

> Do you make the pull request inside emacs?

I've usually faced admin issues trying to get the necessary tokens to make PRs in emacs. Just render, copy & paste in the PR title/description field.

> Are you using it to compile a note from all of the commits in a certain branch?

That's right. All work relevant to a particular ticket is captured in a single org-mode file. I keep my git history clean and well documented so it's not necessary to use these files to understand commit history though.

> Or something else?

For work unrelated to the JIRA flow (e.g. security bug hunting) I use org-mode to track the entire narrative and use org-babel to inline code necessary for the exploit. This makes security reporting easy as I just render as PDF and shoot it off to the security people.

[0] https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

Post reply on HN