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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

> I want to be able to encode more of my memory and context to my notes with a minimum of fuss, and therefore want to embed images (gasp!), tables, hyperlinks, and even file or sound embeds in my documents.

I do this stuff with my notes in Emacs and it's really nice. Emacs is a graphical application and its notetaking facilities are really outstanding. It even supports syntax highlighted, executable, exportable code snippets, as well as all the basic text formatting, hyperlinks, tables of contents, tables, etc. It's a great tool for developers and sysadmins to use for notetaking.

If you know Emacs isn't for you, that's totally fine, but I wanted to throw this out there for bystanders that when someone suggests to build your notetaking workflow around a great text editor, the proposition is not at all to somehow confine oneself to an 1980s terminal.

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Same here. I use Emacs to write tons of notes. I rely heavily on tables, hyperlinks, timestamps and tags. Images are also possible, just not part of my workflow. All this is trivial, out of the box and I know it will still work many years down the road.

Even custom hyperlinks and text notes that refer to chunks inside PDFs are easy to do.

My life and work would be impoverished without emacs.

Thank you Richard

I personally dislike emacs, but say the same.

Why?

vim would not be what it is, without emacs to rage against.

vim would not be what it is without having become a shallow emacs.

Emacs is emacs because its extensible, between vim, neovim and vim9, im starting to think people might enjoy the extensibility seeing as that brings vim up to 3 scripting languages to write things in.

vim has become what it purported to hate

I don't think Vim ever hated extensibility. Vim is defined by its modality and vocabulary and grammar, which Emacs lacks without extensions like evil.

Your phrase 'Images are also possible' worries me. But then you go on to say 'All of this is trivial ...', which makes me feel a lot better.

I've had many well-intentioned but ultimately abortive attempts to get on board with Emacs.

So, are images 'possible' or 'trivial'? Not trolling, and I do note that you say it's not part of your workflow.

eehh...

so (out of the box) in org mode if you type [[./file/path/to.png]] it will turn into a link, if you hit Ctrl-c-x-v it will toggle between showing images as a link (which will open in a new emacs buffer) and just showing the images inline.

ALSO you can just drag an image file onto an emacs window and it will display it in a new buffer.

however getting it so that A) images are displayed automatically when you finish typing the [[path]] and/or B) dragging an image into emacs will result in a new link in orgmode... that's probably possible

https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download

This is the package you're looking for. Just drag and drop images into the org mode buffer and you're done. I've been using it for years to take lecture / book notes in org mode where I have to constantly take screenshots and embed them in my notes.

that's part B.

part A is still annoying though. if you have inline images toggled and type in a new image it still turns into a link instead of an inline image.

That's an org mode setting, can be added to the #+startup declaration at the top of the file.

You cannot embed images in Org documents. Or rather, you can, but would need to code the support for this for yourself. On the other hand, displaying images within the Org documents is trivial. You just need to have the image file saved somewhere. Then you insert a link to the image file and, with the default settings, you should be able to see the image rendered inline in the document. You can also generate the image from within the document. You write a ditaa code block, execute it, and the png with your UML (or whatever) is inserted or updated.

On the other hand: no, Emacs is not a WYSIWYG word processor. The need to support terminal as a display backend weights heavily on the pace of GUI improvements. That's because all interface elements need to be renderable on all backends (not strictly true, but the prejudice against GUI-only elements is significant). So if you hope to be able to easily and conveniently display something like this: https://klibert.pl/statics/vw-doc-view.png then Emacs is empathically not the best tool for the job.

It’s as trivial as images in markdown, but there are more optional config options and extensions to, e.g., just paste from the clipboard.

Yea, you will get a lot of Emacs and Emacs with Org mode answers here. To be fair they not wrong :) As a complete emacs newb, start with something like "doom emacs" ! It's brilliant for beginners.

>Emacs is a graphical application

Too few ppl know this.

> Too few ppl know this.

Including me until now. I will examine this emacs of which you speak. No promises but I can at least attempt to run it.

ProTip: Not many ppl like YouTube as a "learning platform" but just look for "doom emacs" on youtube to get the basics. You only a need to "learn" a minimal set of keys+concepts to start to get insane value.

Goodluck :)

Seconding the Doom recommendation. There is no need to become a guru before you can be productive, or to use Emacs for all your coding just to make good use of it for notes. Doom is a great way to quickly get up and running for notetaking with Org mode.

Get used to the basic workflow for a little while and forgive the monospace-ness while you evaluate the workflow. I like taking notes in Gollum wikis, the wiki format used by GitLab and Github. The project management features enabled by default in Doom will kick in for that. Decide how you feel about those.

If you like the workflow, take a look at org-modern and take a few minutes to work out the proportions for variable pitch fonts. Then you can have Org text render in a nice, proportional font that you like and use monospace only for the embedded source code (including shell languages) blocks.

As an alternative to the using git repos to store notes collected into projects, take a look at Org Roam v2 for keeping a topic-based knowledgebase that you can work with without thinking much about the filesystem, and which offers mindmapping features.

That stuff works great for me, has required zero substantial elisp knowledge to get working, and has been natural for me to ease into. I hope you find a workflow you like!

So ? :) How did it go ?

As far as I can tell, embedding images into org documents still requires saving them to a directory and linking them. I can't seem to find a way to get it to actually embed the image data into the document, for example like a base64 data URL or something.

This is the only way I've done it, since my org notes are organized into git-based wikis and that's kinda what I expect from wikis.

Direct embedding binary data in the Org files would be cool for emailing Org files around, though. It looks like Org does support this kind of embedding on export, if you don't mind exporting to other formats when you send documents around.

Base64 images and URLs are possible with extensions, but simple files are better IMO. Getting URLs asynchronously doesn’t work well, and base64 embedding seriously bloats the text file and makes it more difficult to plain text tools on it. (E.g., you’ll get false positive grep results.)

I have images, audio, and backlinks using UUIDs in my terminal emacs. The image support is the worst, as I have to open the image and then it takes over the screen until I dismiss it, but it’s usable.

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