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Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

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Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#31

Post by kreyenborgi »

geokon wrote: post #22

I used Orgmode for years, but I think fundamentally tieing your markup to your editor is kind of a bad sign... I'd be curious to hear counterarguments though. I think the primary reason it's tied is because you sort of can't make standalone ELisp apps (or at least nobody does). Otherwise you'd just have an `org2html` and `org2pdf` application at the command line. Alternatives like Asciidoc are not perfect, esp for li…

Well, there's org-mode plugins for vim and vscode, github displays it just fine, pandoc processes it, there's a syntax specification at https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax-edited.html, a separate clojure implementation at https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser using EBNF, several Android and iOS apps. And Emacs has been around long enough that it's likely to keep being around for at least as long (see Lindy Effect).

Org is hardly more tied up to the editor than any of the many other formats people use – all of these have more or less complete editor support depending on what features you need (e.g. if you start doing fancy literate programming in markdown, or azathoth forbid, try commenting out lines, you'll find spotty support in at least some of the existing implementations). And if you like the full combination of features that Emacs+Org gives you, you'll be hard pressed to find another environment to replace that, so ... why bother?

(OTOH if you only need some minor part, like html export, and you have to work with people already using other formats, then those other formats might be better.)

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#32

Post by agumonkey »

canistel wrote: post #2

If there is one tool (if I can call it that) that changed my life, it is Org Mode. I was a Vim guy who in a desperate attempt to get digitally organised was forced to give Org Mode a try and got sucked into Emacs. I now live better organised, with far less anxiety and remain unfazed at the multi-tasking demands of the corporate world, all thanks to this major mode.

I use org mode as simple outline or table but so far the organization part still evades me.. I guess I'm too chaotic still to understand how to make real good use of it.

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

geokon wrote: post #22

I used Orgmode for years, but I think fundamentally tieing your markup to your editor is kind of a bad sign... I'd be curious to hear counterarguments though. I think the primary reason it's tied is because you sort of can't make standalone ELisp apps (or at least nobody does). Otherwise you'd just have an `org2html` and `org2pdf` application at the command line. Alternatives like Asciidoc are not perfect, esp for li…

> I used Orgmode for years, but I think fundamentally tieing your markup to your editor is kind of a bad sign... I'd be curious to hear counterarguments though.

For better or worse, Org Mode is a feature-rich application, and org mode format is markup tied to that application. Using it as general-purpose markup is kind of a nice side effect of it being plaintext, and that even the portable subset is more feature-rich than most markup alternatives.

For full compatibility, you'd have to port Org Mode to different editors, in the same way you'd port a native app between OS-es. Org Mode is very much an application that's making full use of its platform's specific features and APIs, except here the platform isn't Windows/Win32 API, but Emacs/Elisp.

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#34

Post by regularfry »

wild_egg wrote: post #5
canistel wrote: post #2

If there is one tool (if I can call it that) that changed my life, it is Org Mode. I was a Vim guy who in a desperate attempt to get digitally organised was forced to give Org Mode a try and got sucked into Emacs. I now live better organised, with far less anxiety and remain unfazed at the multi-tasking demands of the corporate world, all thanks to this major mode.

I keep hearing anecdotes like this and truly want to give Emacs a shot. Do you use it exclusively on a PC? My big blocker is that a significant portion of my time is on a phone rather than a computer these days and I have to think that all the chording with Emacs would get impossibly cumbersome. Anyone here have a good way to leverage Emacs on the go?

I've had a stab at this. My requirements are pretty much:

- Actual emacs as a client strongly preferred; don't assume anything else can correctly parse org-mode - Sync between Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android - Don't force me to remember to sync, so `git commit`/`git pull` or `rsync` isn't viable unless it's completely hidden - Don't allow me to overwrite the file if the sync has failed - Work from an ssh terminal

The closest I got was `crdt-mode.el`. That gives me real-time updates between connected clients. It needs some UI polish around connecting and disconnecting, but it's nothing unworkable. I can get to it on Android via termux ssh to emacs running in tmux on an always-on raspberry pi in my office. That's just about ok in terms of key chording for most things. You do lose some capabilities. I've contemplated getting a bluetooth keyboard for these situations but obviously that's not usable in a lot of situations you might want to be taking notes in. I got in the habit of using the very top of the file as a dumping-ground for one-liners from mobile because sometimes that was just easier than anything else. If I was feeling particularly keen I might try something in the spacemacs vein to make the key combinations work better on mobile. From memory org-agenda was fine, so I tended to use that as a default view for TODOs.

What's annoyingly broken is having Windows in the mix. There's something not quite right about the way `crdt-mode` handles line endings which means updates from Windows mess up the other copies, and given how much org-mode relies on line endings it can completely break whole sections at a time. I ended up using the version running on SSH from Windows too, but there are a couple of chords which Windows Terminal mucks up. That bit's not great.

Take Windows out and sshing to a shared terminal emacs instance running in `screen` is worth a try, with the caveat that you will have to rebuild the muscle memory for the chording on mobile. The termux keyboard has a couple of niceties that the default Android one doesn't, without which it would be a complete non-starter.

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

natrys wrote: post #29
geokon wrote: post #22

I used Orgmode for years, but I think fundamentally tieing your markup to your editor is kind of a bad sign... I'd be curious to hear counterarguments though. I think the primary reason it's tied is because you sort of can't make standalone ELisp apps (or at least nobody does). Otherwise you'd just have an `org2html` and `org2pdf` application at the command line. Alternatives like Asciidoc are not perfect, esp for li…

Well if you don't do that, you would only have a lowest common denominator system with none of the advanced features, and the world has enough of those. If I wanted to emulate a fraction of org-mode features I use daily in markdown, I would have to use Obsidian with a bunch of plugins, and we would end up in same boat. I don't know the exact spec situation, but I know that comprehensive parsing libraries in modern no…

The format/spec isn't really the problem. It's just that parsing and rendering Org Mode files is like parsing and rendering .PSD files - getting your app to open and write PSDs alone does not turn your app into Photoshop; you're still missing 99% of the features.

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#36

Post by hatmatrix »

natrys wrote: post #29
geokon wrote: post #22

I used Orgmode for years, but I think fundamentally tieing your markup to your editor is kind of a bad sign... I'd be curious to hear counterarguments though. I think the primary reason it's tied is because you sort of can't make standalone ELisp apps (or at least nobody does). Otherwise you'd just have an `org2html` and `org2pdf` application at the command line. Alternatives like Asciidoc are not perfect, esp for li…

Well if you don't do that, you would only have a lowest common denominator system with none of the advanced features, and the world has enough of those. If I wanted to emulate a fraction of org-mode features I use daily in markdown, I would have to use Obsidian with a bunch of plugins, and we would end up in same boat. I don't know the exact spec situation, but I know that comprehensive parsing libraries in modern no…

I can't imagine the use cases for parsing org-syntax in Julia - is it for textual analysis?

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#37

Post by bananapub »

agumonkey wrote: post #32
canistel wrote: post #2

If there is one tool (if I can call it that) that changed my life, it is Org Mode. I was a Vim guy who in a desperate attempt to get digitally organised was forced to give Org Mode a try and got sucked into Emacs. I now live better organised, with far less anxiety and remain unfazed at the multi-tasking demands of the corporate world, all thanks to this major mode.

I use org mode as simple outline or table but so far the organization part still evades me.. I guess I'm too chaotic still to understand how to make real good use of it.

it's not very complicated - it's an outliner mashed into an ad-hoc wiki in your editor, and also lets you mark up things as "tasks" with optional "scheduling". you can just outline things in to it, then when an item congeals enough to become a task, on it to add a TODO tag and now org mode can be an organiser - put it in the agenda agenda, specify a workflow (TODO->PENDING->DONE; TODO->ABANDONED, etc), schedule it, emit it in to an ical file, etc etc.

probably the nicest part of org is that you don't pay for things you don't use - using it as a just a nice way of organising bullet points works fine, and then there are a jillion optional features around it.

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#38

Post by budzynski »

nanna wrote: post #24

An org mode syntax I use heavily that I rarely see mentioned, including in this cheat sheet, is the obscurely named Radio Targets. Enclose any term or phrase in >>, hit C-c C-c on it, and then any previous or further instance of it in the same buffer will be automatically linked to it from then on. Incredibly useful when you're wroting notes on a long book for example and want to keep track of the instance when a ter…

Hi, the docs are quite brief about this. Would ratio targets allow you to create a link to a website to the word >> would always lead to a corresponding link? Do you have an example of radio targets?

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#39

Post by eviks »

If you're alreay spending a lot of special chars for a quote combo (hash, plus, newline), why does it have to be so verbose instead of something shorter like... a quotation mark? And for paired stuff maybe the plus sign could be replaced with some paired symbol like {?

#+BEGIN_QUOTE

#+END_QUOTE

Re: Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)

#40

Post by tetris11 »

budzynski wrote: post #38
nanna wrote: post #24

An org mode syntax I use heavily that I rarely see mentioned, including in this cheat sheet, is the obscurely named Radio Targets. Enclose any term or phrase in >>, hit C-c C-c on it, and then any previous or further instance of it in the same buffer will be automatically linked to it from then on. Incredibly useful when you're wroting notes on a long book for example and want to keep track of the instance when a ter…

Hi, the docs are quite brief about this. Would ratio targets allow you to create a link to a website to the word >> would always lead to a corresponding link? Do you have an example of radio targets?

It's more of a glosssary.

    My Glossary:
    - >>: Smart guy, gets bullied a lot Nelson Muntz
    - >>: Troubled guy, does a lot of bullying to Martin Prince.
  
    Watching the Simpsons, Martin Prince seems to get into a lot of altercations with Nelson Munz.
Any reference of "Martin Prince" or "Nelson Muntz" will be highlighted (YES, even in the definitions themselves) due to the radio targets in the document (you may have C-c C-c the target first to initialise it).

You can click on that highlighted text to jump to where it was first defined.

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