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Comment by Dolores12 | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with org-mode? It is plain text file. I see no major differences compared to markdown.

I use Spacemacs in my day job as a Clojure programmer but I prefer Bear Note for note taking because it starts up faster and all actions (pasting, adding images, adding todos, merging notes, exporting mardown) match simpler and I don't need to memorize new hotkeys and do any additional setup/scripting. If taking notes was my daily job I would probably spend some efforts to learn org-mode.

I find org-mode perfect for this. It's lightweight, the files can be interlinked and over time, expanded, if necessary into larger notes.

I've been using a variant of the zettelkasten method for keeping book summaries and notes on index cards. It's been nice but the indexing method I'm using is cumbersome. I've been toying with the idea of moving just that into something digital.

Another thing that I recently came across is https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole/. It's also Emacs based and might be something I can actually use.

Have you tried using it on mobile?

There is Orgzly, but it's not very practical.

People are much too afraid of Emacs to ever use it.

> afraid

That's quite the value judgement. Emacs, when compared with Atom and Sublime Text, has a tremendous learning curve for little payback. It's extensible? So are they, and with programming languages that are useful outside the editor, no less. It's powerful? So are they.

And more, they implement something resembling a common UI to the rest of the applications on your system. Sure, you can emulate that with the proper installation of modes into Emacs, but at that point you're already down the rabbit hole.

Emacs may still be the king of the hill, but it's a really nasty hill to climb. And with Atom and Sublime text sitting just a little below the summit with a nice, paved road to them it's going to take more than just being a bit better than them to justify that final hill climb.

So, no, people aren't afraid. Emacs is just not worth most people's time.

Sincerely, a VIM and emacs user.

You're ignoring distributions of Emacs which are designed to solve this problem by bundling and pre-configuring everything.

Spacemacs, Prelude, and Scimacs are all good options depending on your use-case.

I mean if all you want is a text editor, some SCM integration, some build tool integration, syntax highlighting, and code completion then going with a specialized tool just for that is a good choice.

But the power of Emacs is that it can do nigh-anything and everything is a few lines of elisp away from being tightly integrated.

* Organize your tasks and projects with org-mode and work seemelessly with your team by syncing with org-trello.

* Use mu4e and magit integration to seemelessly send and apply patches and pull projects and todo items directly from email.

* Use one of the IRC clients or emacs-slack to do the same thing. Generate snippets on the fly in your team's chat from the currently selected text.

* Use org mode with org-babel and TRAMP to create interactive notebooks carrying out tricky tasks directly on the remote server from within emacs.

* Use emacsclient --tramp when you're SSH'd on a remote box to transparently edit in your local emacs.

* Replace tmux and tmuxinator with emacs-server.

I don't realy think it's small step up.

> Organize your tasks and projects with org-mode and work seemelessly with your team by syncing with org-trello.

I disagree to this point. org-trello should work in that way "in theory", but actually it doesn't. Its usage is quite opinionated, and its syncing didn't work as I expected when I tried it out. Instead, we probably should have an org-mode integration with GitHub/GitLab issues.

But how hard is it to learn, and remember, how to do all these things?

Respectfully, you're describing workflows that very few people use today. Patches over email or chat? I've only seen that use at any scale with Linux kernel development. Tricky tasks on remote servers, editing files on remote servers? Most places prefer immutable servers, which run peer reviewed remedial scripts via Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt.

Org mode is one of the few unique bits of software available only on Emacs, but you can get 80% (if not more) of its functionality with markdown notes and regular email/calendaring software for 20% (if not less) of the learning curve.

EDIT: And I'm not ignoring Spacemacs and its kin. Yes, they are more user friendly, but they still do not follow many of the common OS UI models, and you still are interacting with a single-purpose programming language for any customization. The abstraction falls apart quickly when you try do do something more powerful (like opening the package manager).

Not to mention, the last three times I tried to do Go development in Spacemacs it would freeze in an infinite busy loop. It's unfortunate that a broken mode can completely hose the entire editor in this day.

Side note: I have been coding a large golang application for 3y now on emacs/spacemacs with the 'go' layer. Never had a single problem.

Otoh, I tried both atom and vscode for the same job, but quickly ran away because using an editor on which modal editing is not a first class citizen is not for me anymore.

I sincerely agree all you mentioned above. I believe emacs is the best editing tool, actually it is an Operating System. But I still not gonna use it, since it just not worth my time to master all of them skills comparing alternatives, which is just use Sublime and Atom. For me the choice equals to setup my own Git server, or use Github or Gitlab.

There is a huge difference. It's proprietary, what I mean by that is you can't really edit it with anything else than Emacs. I used it with Spacemacs, and when an upgrade broke it, I left with no notes... Very frustrating experience, I immedieately abandoned it when it happened. Never used org-mode since then.

> It's proprietary, what I mean by that...

That’s not what that means.

I take your point in it being bound to Emacs however. Pandoc is an excellent tool for conversion though, and other editors are catching up quickly.

It's not proprietary, it's still just plain text, and can be edited with anything. Emacs adds a lot of nice features on top of it to manipulate that text, but it's still just text.

See http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/.

Yes, I have been fooled by the "oh it's just plain text" notion also and have regretted it. Did you try to actually open an org-mode file with anything else than Emacs? Did you try get any meaningful information out of it on a mobile phone or with an another editor? I did...

Take a look at Orgzly for interacting with org files on Android, and set up a dropbox shared folder between your devices, including your smartphone. Works well for me.

As for extracting meaningful info with other editors, I would say it depends on how you structure your notes. For me it's just a very long bullet list with some tags here and there. So a plain text editor will only 'add' some star characters at the beginning of each lines, which appears quite readable to my eyes.

I've been opening org files with Atom, VS Code and inside Github without a problem.

Gogs renders well behaved org files also. The VS Code extension should get the update to allow folding soon. After that the Ctrl-c Ctrl-v crowd could use it nicely with Orgzly and Syncthing say bypassing Emacs until they need a full development environment. You could use Pandoc importing/exporting to other formats without Emacs. For note taking it's promising. Sharing to Orgzly on mobile captures a lot.

All the time. I'm curious as to what problems you were having?

Obviously you won't be able to execute code blocks, reformat tables, follow links, fold sections etc.. but everything is just a search away..

TBH, I wonder why you had to "leave without your notes", when pandoc eats org-mode for breakfast and gives you a multitude of target options, including markdown (and this is really after wondering what prevented you from using a fresh Emacs install, if you couldn't fix yours, to export them in the first place)

In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).

Except Markdown looks like text with some special characters to embellish it a little. It's perfectly readable and legible in any text editor. Navigation is the only thing lacking, but manipulation is as easy as manipulating text is in your editor of choice.

Note: I don't know what raw orgmode files look like, maybe they're similar to Markdown.

They are. Org format is kind of a better and more powerful Markdown. As plaintext, it looks cleaner to me.

The thing is, Org format is defined by the way Org-mode in Emacs handles it. Beyond Markdown-like features (which are rather easy to parse out; the format is similar), you get things in the data format that to date are handled only by Emacs. Think of Emacs + org mode as a better Jupyter notebooks than just editor for static text documents.

Consider this note I have in my org file for work tasks.

  ** DONE [#A] Testing prior to syncup meeting       :CUSTOMER_development:
     CLOSED: [2018-07-13 Fri 14:04]
     :LOGBOOK:
     CLOCK: [2018-07-13 Fri 12:14]--[2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] =>  1:50
     :END:
 
     - [X] Baseline test for REDACTED
       - REDACTED NOTE
     - [X] Baseline test for SOMETHING ELSE

If you rendered this as a static document (e.g. export to HTML), you'd see the headline "Testing prior to syncup meeting", and the bullet-point list at the bottom. The remaining things are metadata, nicely formatted by Emacs (and partially hidden; e.g. :LOGBOOK: / :END: block starts folded by default). The metadata shown are part of Org-mode's task management aspect - the todo state (DONE), date of task's finalization, time clocking (CLOCK: entries), tags (CUSTOMER_development). Together, they enable me to very efficiently mange tasks, track spent time, and autogenerate invoice data.

In this sense, org format is both a nice Markdown alternative, and - when coupled with Emacs - enables very powerful interactive documents that can handle task management, time clocking, literate programming, spreadsheeting, and other tasks.

I suspect Org will never be as popular as Markdown simply because, if you wanted to go beyond Markdown feature parity, you'd have to reimplement half of Emacs to handle those "advanced" aspects.

Oh I don't doubt the usefulness of Org-Mode, but I guess the point is the one you bring up: if you want to use Org-Mode it's Emacs or the highway.

With Markdown I can use any editor from a full-featured IDE all the way down to `cat` or `ed` and all I'm giving up are some quality of life features. It's the same format at the bottom, and it has the added benefit of being ubiquitous in that nearly every editor has some basic Markdown support. I can write it anywhere and take it anywhere, not so for Org-Mode.

I think I prefer the Markdown approach of keeping the file format light and plain, and building the quality of life features on top in the editor.

To be clear: Org format is just plaintext, and you can use it mostly in the same way you use Markdown. It's nowhere near as popular, but if all you want is Markdown feature parity, then there is growing support in other editors and places. It's only when you want to go beyond Markdown that this becomes "Emacs or the highway".

Biggest difference for me is, that I had already been taking notes in markdown since before I heard about it. The only change for me was the welcome relief of not having to be creative any more about what headings or links should look like. Rest of the syntax I already used because that's how I've always made text files "look good".

As for your orgmode example, it's not a very good example of "just plaintext" if the metadata code in between the bits of text is larger than the content of the note. I imagine that with nice syntax highlighting it becomes easier to parse in just a glance, but then it's no longer "just plaintext" in the same way that e.g. YAML isn't.

It probably works very well, but to me it looks a lot like a plaintext encoding of a database record or something. It's a different use case. Not a simple note that is "basically plaintext". For instance I would not feel entirely comfortable editing your example without worrying I'd mess up the structure or produce a syntax error. Though maybe the format is really forgiving, I can't tell. What happens if you forget the :END: bit, for instance?

You can certainly write org in ed, if you're masochistic enough. You could also use Vim or VSCode or whatever floats your boat, and you will just be missing the more useful stuff (agenda integration, babel, etc), but if you just want to use it as a markup language, there's good support in other editors, and ease of export as well (pdf, html, docx, odt...) with pandoc. I don't get why you think that editing org is any harder than editing markdown, given editor support.

The big difference is that Markdown is way simpler, you can read it reasonably easy with Notepad even, and this is why every reasonable editor can Render it preview it, export it. Even browsers or small apps can show a HTML rendered markdown. There are even standalone Markdown editors, but there is no standalone org-mode editor.

You can render a subset of Org mode just as easily as Markdown - they mostly differ with syntax. The problem is, Org format is not just a format for static documents - it also accounts for things you'd like to achieve with plaintext notes, and most of those "extra features" are defined in terms of their Emacs/Org-mode implementation. Which is something very hard to clone.

An org-mode subset comparable to Markdown isn't more complex than Markdown itself.

This is a silly comment.

Of course you can read Orgmode in plain text, because that’s all it is. Maybe you looked at a file with a bunch of meta-data, or a file with a bunch of code blocks, but so what? Ignore the meta-data and just read the notes. They are all delimited by asterisks by their header level. Links are simple. Tables are simple, even tables with formulas are readable.

Further more Markdown is a poorly defined plaintext format, which is why there are so many variants of it, and processors specific to those variants. If you don’t believe me, remember that GFM is not official markdown.

Orgmode is at least well defined, so when other editors catch up and are able to implement all the features Emacs has when using it, they should behave similarly. If you want a well defined plain text format that exports to HTML/PDF/Word/RichText take a look at AsciiDoc or reStructuredText.

But don’t blame Emacs for leveraging its power over a relatively simple plain text format. There are even packages these days for Vim, Sublime, Atom, Jetbrains to make good use of Orgmode without Emacs.

I just use HTML directly if I need formatting. I find it wuch easier to remember its syntax than Markdown.

what? it's plain text, you could read it with notepad.

Org-mode itself is an Emacs addon, so it's not surprising that you cannot run it without Emacs. Emacs and org-mode are much more stable and much less likely to die than any other software, and that's precisely why I'm using them for a decade already.

The org-mode file format is plaintext, just like Markdown, and you definitely can edit and view it with any text editor. You will obviously lose the convenience of org-mode, though. Additionally, it's simple enough that you can easily implement a parser/importer for any other software.

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