The Many Uses of Org Mode | Hacker News Reader

The Many Uses of Org Mode

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76 pointstarboreus21 comments

Org-mode was invaluable while I was writing my PhD thesis. I had long structured lists full of checkboxes and progress indicators showing everything I still needed to do. To add to the list I used org capture which is great for not breaking flow. Often while writing I'd think "ooh how did I refer to this in chapter 2?", capture that as a todo and carry on working.

I also struggled with procrastination during my PhD so I use org-mode to implement the pomodoro method to great success. My notes actually document exactly what times I worked on each point.

I've used it to document figures for publishing papers. The org file explains how each figure is made and reproduces the figures and intermediate data when executed. I freely mix programming languages.

Most of my work focuses on scientific computing of one form or another.

Org-mode is the digital lab notebook that I have needed forever. I have a private repo with one folder per general project and one or more org files inside. I mostly treat them as append-only FILO pipes.

PI wants a progress report? Export the relevant headings to a PDF and email it.

I want some literate-programming style "work in progress"? Easy, you can even hook jupyter in, and dump plots out simply. Export it to a PDF if you want, or make it a blog post with some nice HTML styling.

Project documentation? easy.

Paper drafts? Yup.

It's wonderful.

That does sound nice, but I'm a bit confused about using it for _project documentation_. Are any of these open-source? Although org is plaintext and thus technically cross-editor compatible, it's meant to be edited in Emacs, so would contributors just need to use Emacs?

I render org to HTML (or let github do it for me for readmes, just as it does for markdown).

What org is very good at is treating HTML, LaTeX, markdown, etc. as, effectively, compilation targets.

`C-c C-e h h` : spits out foo.html

`C-c C-e l p` : spits out foo.tex, foo.pdf.

> would contributors just need to use Emacs?

As you note, org-mode text is just special plaintext, no different from Markdown (other than being rather more powerful).

And of course folks should want to use emacs, or a similarly-powerful editor in which it's possible to build something like org-mode. Why use worse tools when better ones are equally available?

Github will display org files. You can have a README.org

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

That's only two uses, OP! There's also tables, flowcharts (https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-dot-diagrams.html), Gantt charts, and HTML publishing!

And literate programming with org-babel! (http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...)

Org-mode is really fantastic when I work on a project alone, but I always failed to use it when collaborating with others without finding myself with a huge amount of duplication with JIRA, Trello, or whatever collaborating tool is being used.

Not sure how that could be improved without adding a lot of complexity :(

For me, org mode becomes a note taking and link dumping ground. I let JIRA be my todo list, and throw notes and links to different files in my org-mode file. The problems I have is when there's personal notes that should probably exist in the JIRA cards for others to use.

EDIT: I also have been using it for documentation. Github parses orgmode files, so its useful for me and the rest of me team in these cases.

> I always failed to use it when collaborating with others without finding myself with a huge amount of duplication with JIRA, Trello, or whatever collaborating tool is being used.

You could always try to convince everyone else to use org within a git repo. I'm serious: a decentralised VC system with structured text files is basically the centralised-project-tool killer.

And it's free. And it means everyone using emacs!

You say that you’re serious, but your comment sounds like a joke, so I’m a bit confused :)

So, in case you were serious: there are good reasons to use more visual and collaborative tools in a team, one is that people won’t learn emacs just to be able to work with others and I personally don’t really care what editors my coworkers use, another reason is that non-engineers are also part of the team, and another one is that JIRA/Trello/etc support integration in others tools (GitHub, Slack, etc.).

I was serious about using a decentralised version-control system & structured text files.

I was semi-serious, semi-joking about how wonderful it'd be for everyone on a team to use emacs. It really is the best editor in existence, and it really is usable by anyone, not just developers. And it integrates with git[0], GitHub[1], Slack[2] &c. too!

[0] https://magit.vc/

[1] https://github.com/vermiculus/magithub

[2] https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack

Hahaha, the Slack support in emacs is really fun to see! I will give it a try, thank you for sharing :)

I haven't tried them, but there is org-jira and org-trello for sync.

I like to use org mode for cleaning up my hard drives... a little script to pipe du into something that sums the files in a directory and adds asterisks, and viola, you have a UI for finding all the large and delete-able files & directories.

I haven't used org mode for all the other cool things it can do, but I remember watching a great video about someone who uses it a lot like a Jupyter notebook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-dUkyn_fZA&feature=youtu.be

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Capture templates are one of the most useful features.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html

Org mode is my goto tool for:

- taking any sorts of notes

- agenda stuff

- word processing (through export to latex)

- todo lists, long-term shopping lists

- literate programming (my .emacs is in org mode, also many scripts in my notes)

- bookmarking (I have links to gnus threads to look at later, links to related documents in agenda entries or notes, links to servers I ssh into, links to some commands I run often, etc..)

and probably other things I don't remember ATM. Incredibly useful tool.

Is there an equivalent for vim?

spacemacs grin

More seriously, there're https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode & https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer — but even more seriously, take a look at emacs + evil-mode (which make emacs a vim-clone, but an easily- & pleasantly-extensible vim-clone).

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