Hacker News Reader

Comment by hultner | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never used orgmode but heard of it frequently. As a non emacs user would it make sense for me to try it out and could some one give me a brief explanation of the benefits?

I’m a heavy tmux and vi-user so I already practically live in my terminals.

View on HN

I use org-mode heavily. I write specifications in it with ascii diagrams, code samples, figure captions, footnotes, etc... and export it all to a nicely fomatted PDF with rendered diagrams (thanks to the bundled ditaa).

I use it for organizing todo lists, time tracking, and generating time sheets.

I've used it to publish a book.

I use it as a super-powered Jupyter-style notebook for data analysis. It as a sub-package called org-babel that lets me interact with any language using the normal Emacs modes and tooling. This lets me query results from a database, send it to a code-block in my org file which executes on my machine and spits the results back into my org-file as a nicely formatted table. org-mode also has fully fleshed out spreadsheet system. For hacky analysis projects I can't think of anything better.

I use it as a light-weight Kanban board/issue manager for personal projects as well.

I started with making todo lists. It was easy to mark each row as TODO or DONE. I was able to indent underneath each todo to make sub tasks, and fold each section up and move it around easily. Then I found a way to add due dates to each item, and then view them all in a calendar view. I also found that I could add tags to each item, and then filter by tags. So if I had a question for my coworker I would tag that todo under his name and I could retrieve that later.

Between tags and dates, you can stop worrying about the order of your todo list items and just throw new ones in there, and still easily find them because they're now structured by date and tag. You can also export your calendar and do other exports as well.

I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what org mode is capable of, but that's how I was able to dip my toe into it and pick up new functionality over time.

If any org-mode wizards want to point out some other big use-cases that I've missed then I'd love to hear about that. I think some people even outline and publish books using org-mode so it's quite a deep system!

Edit: I should also add that I came over from tmux+vim by using spacemacs, which is a vim-mode oriented distribution of emacs which comes with its own opinionated set of plugins and "layers" that you can easily add. It's worth a look if you're emacs-curious

That's quite informative. I've been using Emacs for over 25 years, including maintaining to-do lists, but have never dipped my toes into org-mode. Time to give it a try.

I'm still a heavy vi user and I still continue to use vi for everything else, well except org-mode. 2 years ago, I did the jump and installed Emacs with Evil + Org-mode, i.e. I can use Emacs with vi commands. I use now org-mode daily - taking notes for my work, clocking in times, making at the end reports per project in order to make bills for my clients. I am far from using all org-mode functionalities, but already this improved the life for me sooo much - and I have all my vi keybindings.

It goes so far, that make my programs to write reports in org-mode, so that I can read display, browse, search and drill down in them with org-mode - for big program generated reports it's a great advantage - they are nicely displayed, but at the same time you can use them with diffs (regression test reports), grep, etc.

Additionally I use org-mode for project planning to generate gantt charts and as well for my private know-how database about IT matters - commands that I use, tricks, code snippets.

This year I installed spacemacs, wich is an emacs with a special configuration, looks nicer and has the vi functionality built-in.

That said, when I code, I use the terminal and vi.

I use org-mode to track my todos, track my time, and to take notes.

The big benefit for me is that it can link to lots of different types of things within my emacs environment. For instance, I manage my email from within emacs (using mu4e), and I can set up org-mode to quickly make TODOs that link back to whatever email I have open. I can also link to files (local and remote), web URLs (of course), and to git commits which will open in Magit (an excellent git interface). So using it as my todo tracking is really quite handy. It would be less so if I weren't mostly living in emacs already.

Org mode is outliner with some advanced features. Those features depend on what you want to use and they range from time tracking, through cross-linking and reference tracking, inline code execution up to spreadsheet (and it's nice Excel-for-programmers kind of spreadsheet, not a stub). Browsing headlines should give you idea what features are there:

http://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#toc_Tables

There are at least two orgmode plugins for vim. I don't know how complete they are, though.

Orgmode is plain-text formatted, so you don't need a plugin to read it. However, the plugin gives you the ability to fold headings automatically, format tables automatically, and handle indenting and insertion of headings more easily.

It's convenient, but not life changing as some people think. It's worth using if you already use emacs, but it's not worth switching over.

(I use emacs and org-mode extensively. Before that I used vi)

Org mode is very powerful for notes, outlines, and much much more.

Org files are also very easily compiled to many different formats, including Tex, txt, html, etc.

Org-mode was the thing that really got me into emacs. Nowadays I don't even use org-mode as much, but I couldn't imagine a life without emacs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com