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Comment by hanklazard | Hacker News Reader

All the the recent Org Mode content on HN has really gotten me interested. I feel like I’ve tried so many systems over the years (including just using one big text file in Joplin currently) ... this one seems to be very well-liked, but the learning curve, at least for someone who is new to emacs, seems steep. I’ve started by just installing Doom on my clients and am slowly learning my way around.

Two questions for those with more experience: 1. Do you think this is a good system for someone NOT actually working in emacs all day long (I’m not a programmer)? 2. I see some mobile apps out there that claim to allow Org Mode use on phones ... is this system of note-taking / task mgmt actually usable on a mobile device?

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I'm one of the people who started using emacs just for org-mode about a year ago. I've been using it daily to manage my schedule, TODOs and projects. It's nice, but IMO overhyped by a very vocal religious minority. I've been spending as much time configuring little things and working around rough edge cases than it has actually saves me. Elisp is still somewhat of a mystery to me and I'm mostly copying and pasting snippets without truly understanding what's going on.

I've encountered so many little issues that resulted in hours of debugging and searching for solutions that the net productivity gain has definitely been negative. True, if I stick with it for 10+ more years, the productivity gain will likely become net positive, but who knows if that will happen. IMO it's quite likely that better systems are going to be invented over the next 1-2 decades. It's clearly outdated.

Only do it if you are willing to invest a large amount of time into learning emacs, and if you are planning to stick with it for decades. The best for me way to describe it is: Emacs is the ultimate procrastination tool. It's great at making you feel productive by letting you do meta things with elisp and configs, when you really should just be getting stuff done.

I've used emacs in a dev environment and about 5 years ago i carted my 3000 or so text files from vim/markdown to emacs/org-mode.

I agree, it is an amazing procrastination tool. My advice is to stick to spacemacs with very few configs. About a year ago i started from scratch with my .spacemacs. Now I've got about 20 lines in there, I use deft/org-roam/fira code, and org-attach and I think the less you fiddle the better off you'll be. Think of it like a 20 year old car-yes you can put a turbo in there, yes, you can chop the springs and lower it, but 1 there will be less people to help you when it breaks, and 2 it will break more often.

Honestly, org-roam is moving so fast that if you aren't in the slack or at least watching the commits, I'd think twice. I'm betting there will be breaking changes in the future, whereas deft is rock solid.

There is an alternative named "Foam" https://github.com/foambubble/foam which is described as a Roam Research alternative which combines VSCode, a Markdown editor and Github. Foam appears to be easier to use for people who don't use emacs a lot.

There was a lot of discussion on HN of this software and other alternatives to Roam recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666950

Yes. I use Emacs for Org mode only.

I have tried using Emacs for other purposes, such as writing code. Ultimately I gave up and went back to Vim.

I have also tried other task management systems (you can do a lot with Org mode, but I use it only to keep notes and to-do lists). Org mode is far superior to the other systems I have tried or otherwise considered.

I think of Emacs as a a programming environment. By itself it’s not useful. It needs applications to make it useful. Org mode is one of those applications. Some programming languages have good Emacs modes so Emacs might be worth using to write code in those languages (I program mostly in Haskell, and the Emacs modes for it leave a lot to be desired, so it’s easier to just use Vim.)

The old jokes about Emacs just needing a good text editor really are true. If someone has programmed Emacs to do what you need, or if you’re willing to do it yourself, Emacs works well. If you don’t want to program your editor, don’t use Emacs. Org mode is so good at what it does that I keep an old Linux Thinkpad around just to use it, though I can use it on my Macs as well.

Though I’ve heard of Org roam, I’m not sure what it would add to my workflow so I haven’t used it.

1. I also only use Emacs for org mode. I'm a relatively recent convert (been a few months now) but it's easily the best thing I've used. My main use case - taking notes in meetings, and converting those notes into tasks that I can see in the org-agenda.

2. I don't use it for coding. If I have to code these days, it's in Sublime (and I'd still choose Vim over Emacs for dev anyway)

(And this is all without org-roam, which I could not get working properly with Mac Emacs. There's only so much time I'm willing to invest in these things)

1. Yes, definitely. People do all sorts of stuff with org-mode that has nothing to do with programming, from todos to publishing. Check out the org manual for use cases.

2. You can't use org-roam on mobile but there's Orgzly for generic org-mode viewing and editing. You need to go through some steps to ensure non-conflicting syncing though.

I keep a small folder with files I want Orgzly to pay attention to below my main "org-roam" folder (mostly scheduled stuff - like Calendar.org and Todo.org). I treat them as "read only" on my phone except for "PhoneInbox.org". That is where I add items on the go with Orgzly. At some point I move these out into other org folders (inbox processing). This makes capture into Orgzly very, very fast and using Git keeps it all synched up without issues of file conflicts, etc.

Workflow is something like:

1. Sit down at desk, save all agenda files, and do a commit/push (Emacs/Magit) - this is the entire repo including the sub dir with my Orgzly files 2. On phone (Mgit Android app) do a commit/pull 3. Pull down to desk 4. Resolve conflicts (usually none) 5. Do whatever inbox processing on PhoneInbox 6. Redo the commit/push and pull changes to phone.

This keeps an entire repo of my org files on the phone for reference but minimizes the number of files Orgzly has to deal with and also reduces conflicts from editing a file in Orgzly and on phone. Sounds onerous but I might do this a few times a week, possibly daily if I am having a busy week.

I've been using org-mode for over a decade now. I'll be honest, if you aren't using Emacs regularly, I wouldn't recommend using it just for org-mode. I will say that org-mode was one of the things that got me into Emacs though, so maybe if you like it you'll stick around in Emacs? :)

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