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Comment by zenlot | Hacker News Reader

I've tried to use Org for a while. Actually had hundred of pages of notes written in its format. But it never felt right for me. You press the wrong keyboard button it tries to execute the code, you press another key - text gets reformatted, folds, unfolds, etc... It just doesn't feel text anymore and you have to know lots of complexity of the Org itself to make it useful. And all I want is just to write some text and display it. After all, just converted all .org to .md and use Hugo for displaying it in HTML.

Everytime I see an article about Org, I think how nice it would be to use it and feel comfortable in it, it just never worked out for me.

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> Everytime I see an article about Org, I think how nice it would be to use it and feel comfortable in it, it just never worked out for me.

Came here to say exactly this!

I was in the same boat until i realized emacs key bindings are not adhoc. It falls in to place once the basic emacs key binding conventions are understood.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke...

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5j3lc/emacs_key_bin...

Yes that is my problem as well. I love my org files but it is too easy to make a mistake that can really mess up your file, such as deleting a heading line accidentally will then file everything under the heading above it!

Does undo not put it all right again?

It does :)

Undo in emacs isn't on a very intuitive place.

Those people are complaining that they don't want to learn a new complex UI (what it is - I have wondered in the past if it wouldn't be better for me to simply disable org-mode and edit the files as plain text). Getting using to the undo is part of it.

Yes, if I notice it I can undo obviously! The problem is when I realize the mistake a few edits later...

That's what undo is for, isn't it?

Yeah I got burned by that. Wrote a blog post about it [1] (shameless plug).

[1] https://e-dorigatti.github.io/2020/08/27/lost-notes.html

That's exactly why I built EasyOrg. It has a simple to use editor and an Agenda viewer. You can add, edit and delete org mode todos via a GUI or using the editor. For note taking you use the editor. No difficult Eamcs keybindings and buffers.

The agenda has several different views to help you prioritize what to work on next based on priorities and scheduled timestamps. You can also sort and filter.

It does not support all the Emacs org mode features, but supports the most common ones. The main focus of EasyOrg is on Todos and I tend to use one org file per project (mainly bigger projects, not the shopping list or to do around the house type of stuff). I used to use a regular text file to keep track of what to do for my projects, but with Org mode and EasyOrg's agenda it's easier to see what needs to be done and prioritize.

It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop. Feedback welcome!

https://www.easyorgmode.com

You should check out vimwiki! I came from org-mode and have been using vimwiki the last three months now. It can do .md and export to html. I mainly use it for day to day notes and todo lists.

http://vimwiki.github.io/

Thank you! Org mode has made me try to switch to Emacs for a while, but somehow have never been able to change my workflow, and Emacs is just to bloated to just start up for jotting a simple note... (I've found myself editing .org files in vim, which is just ridiculous!) Maybe this will solve my conundrum!

For the startup time issue, there is EmacsClient[0]. Although, I just typically leave an Emacs window open at all times.

But I did use vimwiki for a while in the past and it was a good middle ground if Emacs feels like too much “extra” to lug around.

[0] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient

If you're familiar with Vim, you might want to give Doom Emacs a try. It has good Vim-like orgmode keybindings.

Never used org as it seems too complicated from the getgo. Although I feel exactly same as you and that's why I've decided to use some free time to build a tool that would help solving the abstract problem of "organising life" easily and efficiently. I plan to create something with the flexibility and convenience of a textedit but functionality of a full fledged personal management tool. Would be happy to share when its ready. https://forms.gle/Vexu6jaZBgnHRoCm7

Yeah, I think it could do with a modal interface: normal mode would perform tree-like operations and allow entering text. Insert mode would treat the entire file as plain text.

... there must be a mode that does this already?

https://github.com/Somelauw/evil-org-mode

I meant modal as in "if you hold down backspace, the item's text will be removed, but the item heading will remain", i.e. the headers are read-only while editing an item. evil-org-mode won't stop me pressing backspace too many times and screwing up.

I don't think I understand what you're asking for, but you can easily switch from org-mode to text-mode and back, on a custom keybinding if you like.

You could use hydra [1] to set up something like this pretty easily. I did have a setup like this once, but found that escaping the 'modes' with an extra keypress when I only typically wanted to do one or two operations wasn't particularly nice.

[1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

I've been slowly getting more and more into org over the years (decades, really). It's nice to just have a simple little text mode that results in easily readable text. Good for brainstorming and scribbling notes. Everything else is just icing.

Yeah, back to vim for you.

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