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Comment by nyellin | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is struggling to stay on top of notetaking or organizing their life digitally, I highly recommend org-mode and deft-mode.

One day I will blog about what org-mode has done for my life, but for now just accept my word: I have typed tens of thousands of words into each of EverNote, Tomboy, and TiddlyWiki. I attempted to use Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, and other todo apps for years. I also unsuccessfully struggled to recall information by bookmarking and tagging three thousand websites in delicious. Nothing worked and I was on the verge of giving up for sanity's sake and just emailing myself reminders and notes.

Then I discovered org-mode and took control. I can recall and store any information in seconds. Org mode can do absolutely everything. Ask and you shall learn.

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It's also had a large positive impact in my life, also after a long search that included writing a couple of ill-conceived note-taking web-site-generation programs.

I now spend most of my time in org-mode, and use it for publishing my web sites and blogs (I wrote org-jekyll for that), staying on top of the tasks of a bunch of people in my team (for which I wrote org-secretary), and keeping up-to-date documentation of the progress of the projects we are working on at HP. And I like being able to export and distribute them in LaTeX -> PDF.

I haven't felt the need of deft-mode: C-c a s does the trick of finding what I need most of the time.

http://orgmode.org/ for those unfortunate Vim souls (like me) who had to google that!

For the interested, here's the best non-brief intro/tutorial to Org-mode that I was able to find: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

It helped me immensely when I was just getting my feet wet with org-mode.

vim clone: https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

Do you use deft-mode along with org-mode, or as an alternative? Could you share some thoughts and experiences? I'm a happy user of org-mode and I'd like to know more :).

Call me old fashioned, but I think notes of different topics shouldn't mingle with one another, and dumping all your notes in one file is a recipe for creeping disorder.

I use Deft for listing note files and performing full-text searches to find the right one. Deft is buggy and I would like something better, so most of the time I fallback to using Ido. I fuzzy-match filenames in the minibuffer and only open Deft when I have no choice.

I added functions to Deft for using multiple note directories: https://github.com/aantn/castle/blob/master/home/.emacs.d/cu...

Warning: The above functions might break Deft's ability to create new notes (it might already be broken). I create the files myself with C-x C-f (or <leader>f in Evil), because I like descriptive filenames.

Call me old fashioned, but I think notes of different topics shouldn't mingle with one another, and dumping all your notes in one file is a recipe for creeping disorder.

Depends on the volume of notes. Trying to do any kind of manual sorting on my notes is a full time job at this point.

> Org mode can do absolutely everything. Ask and you shall learn.

How do you capture different kinds of information — ideas, references to books or websites, events, addresses?

What do you do more often — review agenda or search for specific keywords?

I mostly use Org for taking notes on classes and projects. I don't (yet) use Org for events.

Does this answer your question: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/282143/org.png

(That is a fullscreen Emacs with 3 Org buffers and a Deft search.)

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