Why and how I use Org Mode for my writing and more | Hacker News Reader

Why and how I use Org Mode for my writing and more

evalapply.org

164 pointsadityaathalye159 comments

Every so often I get into using org mode for a while, and the first day or so is always great. But, as with every similar tool in the space, I quickly find cases where the different features don't compose or interact well.

For example,

- org mode will fill out/align an ascii table if you start it and tab. When you change a cell, just tab, and everything aligns into a well-formed table again. Great!

- org mode will let you type latex and then `C-c C-x C-l` to render those latex snippets in text. Lovely!

- but the table logic is unaware of whether $latex-snippets$ have been rendered or not, so you can't see an aligned table whose cells contain latex snippets

Yes, one could do the whole table in latex, but this is more verbose and more fragile if one is incrementally building out the table as one takes notes, and occasionally previewing to confirm it's not broken.

Roughly, I think this illustrates a key tension where

- if everything is pure text, then improving tools is 'easy'

- but people don't actually want pure text for all uses; for some domains, dealing only with text requires some mental energy which can detract from the actual task of interest

Absolutely agree, however the alternatives are lacking. What you get with org (and other plain text formats) is that conversion is easy. I typically do 80% of the my authoring in org, and then finalize the last 20% elsewhere.

Is it perfect? No. But pragmatic.

Don't use org mode. As I said in another comment in this thread, the whole idea is just egregious yak shaving.

Does org mode have semantic understanding of keywords and a language AI to record my tasks for me? Then it's doomed. Does it sync in the cloud and have world class security (only storing decryption keys at rest in specialized hardware, locally on a TPM like device)? Then it's doomed. Does it have beautiful graphical interfaces for tablet, phone, and PC? Then it's doomed. Does it require you to learn how to use an antiquated text editor that only a small niche of non-programmers are using? Then it's doomed.

You can use org mode even if it is doomed to be irrelevant to normal people. It will continue to work. But it's not magic, please STOP TELLING ME IT'S MAGIC. It's not better than what's out there. There's companies sinking tons of money into todo apps and note taking apps that are integrating modern technologies that make any advantage of org mode complete obsolete in the world of advanced GUIs and language models.

> But it's not magic, please STOP TELLING ME IT'S MAGIC. It's not better than what's out there.

While Bear has some cool features, so does Org mode. I personally like that I can author blog posts in it, put in some code in SageMath within my org document, and whenever I export the org file for publishing, it will execute that code.

I like that I can make a note and simultaneously link to an email I have, link to some code in a .cpp file, and link to a Jira ID.

I like that I can log how many minutes I spent on a writing project, and have it automatically enter that data into Beeminder.[1]

And so much more that I'm sure Bear doesn't do.

[1] https://www.beeminder.com/

Again, you are living in the past.

- I can share a note with my wife and kids and they can live edit together.

- I can encrypt my notes and share them across the cloud.

- I can send my notes in an email, I can embed photos, videos, emails, messages in my notes.

- I can send my notes directly to my reminders and attach them to a reminder.

- I can can documents and sketches directly from my notes.

- My notes automatically look for keywords to turn into dates and reminders.

- My notes can add tags and have automatic backups and recovery.

You can also put code blocks within a note, export it, and then run it through a code executor, which is way safer than having some sort of editor automation that will slurp up a random note and hack your computer and steal all your credit card info.

What apps are you currently using?

Have you considered some people just don't use the same features as you?

I have tried a couple of these SaaS note-taking apps and I've immediately hated them. Too much fluff, too much bullshit only put in to justify charging a price for what is effectively notepad running in a cloud. No, I don't need to sync or share anything. I don't need integration with 50 other useless cloud products. I have very little use for software which is proprietary and can't be arbitrarily beaten into submission to do what I want, and only what I want. I have no interest in software which is mobile first and has no decent native app. And no, electron doesn't count.

Acting as though you have the superior taste and everyone who disagrees with you is just out touch only weakens your argument.

If you want to smash rocks, go smash rocks. I'm not against people who want to use emacs, or org mode, or ed and keep it to themselves. I am against people making bold faced claims to outsiders in order to entice them into an ecosystem that is solidly last century. I am against perpetuating myths and ignoring the terrible UX and learning curve of emacs+org mode. And I find it appalling how emacs drones flock to every emacs or org mode post on hacker news and spout off a bunch of nonsense about how org mode is basically nirvana.

I'm not interested in hearing about how you hate the cloud, or you need a terminal based mail editor because "bells and whistles don't appeal to you", or you need to control every aspect of your system down to the ROM to get anything done. Most of us just want to get stuff done and focus on our actual problems, and that's easy to see - big corpos aren't building out your dream world because no one wants it, that's capitalism baby. Most of us want a secure cloud. Most of us want nice, modern, easy to use features and the advances that have come with decades of UX and AI research.

You can have secure, or you can have cloud, pick one.

> Most of us just want to get stuff done and focus on our actual problems, and that's easy to see - big corpos aren't building out your dream world because no one wants it, that's capitalism baby. Most of us want a secure cloud. Most of us want nice, modern, easy to use features and the advances that have come with decades of UX and AI research.

Most of us don't care for the bulk of what gets posted on HN. I'm not seeing the relevance of the diatribe.

Just because others like something doesn't mean there is pressure on you to. Just because you like something else doesn't mean you need to go post about tools that serve a very different purpose.

This is the equivalent of posting on a Rust submission why you like Haskell so much more. Who cares?

> I find it appalling how emacs drones flock to every emacs or org mode post

Are you even hearing yourself.

It’s weird that almost every emacs or vim related post has a thread like this, filled with hate. Hard to explain it honestly. I’ve yet to see a person who would force somebody to use vim instead of whatever editor the other guy is using. Nobody is taking away the beautiful software that have come with decades of whatever. But anyway here we are.

I find it amusing how you so want to tout what your favorite tool can do, and then simultaneously dismiss what other tools can do that yours can't.

Do you comprehend the basic fact that there can be more than one good tool?

> which is way safer than having some sort of editor automation that will slurp up a random note and hack your computer and steal all your credit card info.

It sounds like you have no idea about Org mode and Emacs.

FWIW, I haven't found a better outliner for projects than orgmode and have look for alternatives because of the reasons you mention.

You don’t really understand the users of such software as vim, neovim, emacs etc. After 20+ years of professional experience, the best tools for me and gor my productivity are tools such as the above, and org mode belongs to that list. I’m not here to tell you that you should use such tools or that you should believe in them, but I’m here to tell you that you are nowhere near to being right with the post above, and I’m not sure you’re that open to accept any other opinions. Might want to reflect on that.

You could always try and fix it so the table logic is aware of the latex snippet renderings.

I recently messed around with org-drill, found it wasn't really behaving like I wanted it to, decided to change it myself, and then was pleasantly surprised to find that changing its basic functionality was way easier than I expected (and I've barely started learning lisp/elisp.

I’ve tried so many productivity apps over and org-mode has been the only one that has stuck. I would say what sets it apart from other applications is its malleability. For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task. And the best part is that can be sure that I will be able to use org-mode for the rest of my career on the same terms.

> For example, I built a website blocker that only allows sites relevant to my current clocked in task.

This is screaming for a blog post entry. It's pretty cool.

I agree. I have a similar account where I:

- started using a pomodoro timer in emacs

- noticed I wasn't using getting up for breaks

- thought about how to fix it

- added `(switch-to-buffer "~/reminder.txt")` which read "HEY! go on a break" to the "org-clock-out" hook that was called by the pomodoro timer

In about 5-7 minutes I permantely fixed my issue thanks to the extensibility of emacs.

I think a lot of these things don't get shared or posted because to the initiated they seem trivial. Or it's hard to know what level of experience should be assumed.

I think "start with vanilla emacs and show how to do this one thing" might be a good place though.

That's really cool.

As for how to share in the blog post, I would not recommend starting with vanilla emacs - that would make for a really long blog post. Perhaps just vanilla org config (for people like me who don't use org clocking abilities). Simply post the problem you had and the code you wrote to fix it. Then post it to the Emacs Reddit and Mastodon (you'll get much more engagement from the latter if anyone on your instance/followers is an Emacs person).

I really like Org Mode, but I only need a tiny amount of its functionality. Emacs is my editor of choice anyway, so it's convenient to use Org Mode for my personal daily to-do list and backlog. And not even for a specific workflow system (e.g., GTD or whatever), just tasks with scheduled dates, deadlines, and some custom states. Agenda view is neat, too. That's plenty for me. It always impresses me though when I see how much others can do with it!

Likewise, re: "subset that I find useful". As I note in the post, I've never used it for TODOs etc.

What keeps me in the org life is that whenever I've wanted to do X, orgmode itself and the wider ecosystem have answered "sure, here you go".

And, personally, any learning curve + configuration overhead has been worth it because it composes as a unified system. My brain fares poorly if it has to jump between contexts for a single task (e.g. write lecture/talk notes, separately make a slide deck to present, separately make a live notebook / repo to run a demo, and then have to bounce between the three at run-time).

I don't know... each to their own. This works for me, and I wish others tools that work for them. Life is too short for the annoyance borne of bad-fit personal tools.

edit: clarify opening line

I wonder why a huge disadvantage of all these markup-in-plaintext formats if almost never mentioned: it breaks (the easiness of) search. So you can't simply type `simply type` in your search box to find your phrase because the markup interferes

(What's the best way to deal with it? Are there plugins for the org/markdown etc. format that allow you to search the "invisible" markup-stripped text?)

I think the technical solution to this is to simply index the documents in their rendered (or plain text) format and search against that. Unfortunately that would require an additional tool or plugin.

Org-mode has many backends for exporting, including plain text and html, so if you open the exported document in a browser you can Ctrl+F to search and the browser at least ignores most markup. But I agree, this is an inconvenience common to all markup systems.

In practice, I find org-mode to be much less "noisy" than latex or html for example, and about the same as markdown, so it's still a net win for me.

That's what I sometimes resort to, though copy&paste the text back to the editor as search in a browser is much worse

Oh yes. There are many ways to search in Org mode. I typically only need tagging but you can use the agenda for searching as well.

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.ht...

No mention in that document how to:

  1. Search link text only.  
  2. Search link URL only.  
  3. Search headings only.  
  4. Search under the current heading only.

I don't know about the first two because those aren't a use case for me, but for 3, you want helm-org-rifle-agenda-files, and for 4, I don't know about something org-specific, but you can use emacs' search commands after narrowing the focus to the current subtree (by default bound to C-x n s, I use this so often that I have it bound to H-f, and I revert focus with s-f, so that I am not distracted while working on an entry).

The first two are interesting use cases though, I'll reply again if I find something that works.

For 3 and 4, this seems to make it possible: https://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2017/01/03/Find-stuf...

I, for one, will now go down this rabbit hole ...

So can you mention at least one way to simply search?

How often do you have markup in the middle of a phrase you're searching for? It seems to me like if that's really important to you, then just don't use a lot of markup?

What's your universal eternally valid rule on judging the importance of a phrase I could use to decide that bold/italic is too much?

Orgmode does let you search invisible text, it even expands/collapses headlines/lists etc... automatically as you search.

That's my imprecise phrasing, by invisible I meant plain text without any markup like bold asterisks (but without having to explicitly build it to make it visible to not introduce any extra inconvenience)

For org, you want this: https://orgmode.org/manual/Search-view.html If you want to search only on headings, helm-org-rifle-agenda-files is what you need.

this doesn't work

1. only show the list of headings, not highlight the actual text (and I don't need a new pane for such a simple search, my regular search happens right in the text area)

2. doesn't ignore markup, so `/simply/ search` with one word italicized can't be found with `simply search`

I mostly use fuzzy searching, not exact matching, it's so convenient.

From Emacs, I just don't search in org-mode, I search into typically my entire user directory, in both .txt files, source code files, .org files, etc. using "counsel-rg" (just a wrapper around ripgrep).

It's super quick. I enter, say, at the Emacs rg prompt:

    gmp lib

So that's "gmp<space>lib" and it'll find every line, in any single file, no matter it's format, where, on the same line, there's "gmp" followed by, anywhere else later on the line, "lib", no matter the capitalization.

The wrapper around rg takes care of calling it with the correct magic invocation.

Say I type: "pi rypi" then Emacs/counsel shall spawn a call to rg looking like this (it's configurable):

    /usr/bin/rg --max-columns 240 --with-filename --no-heading --line-number --color never -i "(pi).*?(rypi)"

And, well, I much prefer to enter simply "pi rypi" and have "(pi).*?(rypi)" generated for me.

I've got the call to "counsel-rg" assigned to a shortcut.

I use it all the time.

P.S: ripgrep is an amazing tool written an HN'er, burntsushi. It's really fast and, by default, won't search into many files you don't care about anyway. It is so fast that on my relatively modern machine (AMD 3700X / NVME M.2 PCIe 3.0x4 SSD) I don't bother and typically search from the root of my home directory.

I love fuzzy searching, it should be an option in all text search boxes everywhere (and rg is also great), but this is just not a properly scoped search workflow, it's just too valuable to be able to limit search to document/project/... before reaching for everything

Doom has `space s D` for this

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/modules/c...

Fuzzy searching with things like orderless/consult/grep covers a lot.

For more semantic searching I use https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql

For my very large org-roam I'm investigating taking advantage of search in sqlite more.

I use Xeft[1], which uses libxapian to provide blazing fast full-text search. Turns out I don't need much organisation or discipline beyond a bunch of files and full-text search.

[1] https://github.com/casouri/xeft

I'm ashamed to admit that although I'm an Emacs poweruser (even getting okay'ish at writing elisp after all these years), I use org-mode but I'm terribly bad at it.

I mostly use it because it allows collapsing text and don't use any advanced feature. I'll sometimes include pictures and a piece of code here or there but it's really mostly just text (I take it that's the whole point !?).

And it'd say it's already quite good even when used in that "dumb" way.

OP here. I agree and warrant that is a perfectly legitimate way to use orgmode, viz. as much as one needs it to be, no more, no less.

My personal use case was just plaintext notes, for quite a while. I still haven't included pictures anywhere (as in display inline). So you are more advanced than I, at least in that department :)

I frequently teach new org-mode users how to just "click then tab" to expand nodes as well as using `context-menu-mode` right click.

That way they don't have to remember any bindings, however I point out that the bindings are listed in case they every have interest in memorizing frequently used ones.

Ah the mouse on the other hand is something I rarely reach for : )

It's not you, a system like org mode that allows a user to be terribly bad is a failed system. It's a productivity system that makes you unproductive. It's the kind of yak shaving emacs users love to sell to unsuspecting programmers when they could use modern tools that actually increase their productivity from the start and don't suck them down a rabbit hole of wasted time only to realize they have to set up a small company's worth of infrastructure just to secure and sync notes.

We get it. You don't like Org or Emacs. Don't use it.

I do not like vim. I think the whole concept of modes is stupid. So when I see an article about vim, I skip it.

Yes, I am telling you to go fly a kite.

Writing in Org mode is a guaranteed way to ensure you won't collaborate with anyone on your work.

Funny. Yesterday, I asked a co-worker to edit an org-mode document (it is plain text after all) that will be exported to Latex (because it is a lot easier to deal with Latex in org than to edit raw tex). To my surprise, he did not barf. Kudos to him, but yeah, I'm always apprehensive when I reveal my org workflow to colleagues.

I find that to coworkers unfamiliar with the editor holy wars or strong opinions on text formats they'll just think "this is an interestingly formatted text document" and make their update :D

That depends on the coworkers really. If you got coworkers, who understand, that it is simply plain text, and who have a half decent editor or IDE, they will have at least OK-ish syntax highlighting and should really not have any problem editing the file or collaborating on it.

Nothing wrong with that. The vast majority of my writing is for myself, and most of what I share is done in PDF or HTML format. I somewhat disagree with your claim though. Collaboration can take many forms, only one of which is multiple people editing the same document in its raw form.

OP here. Perhaps attempting to coerce orgmode upon others will satisfy the guarantee.

Personally, my org workflow eases collaboration with people, because it removes friction for me, going from thoughts -to-> working document + code examples + plaintext diagrams and more.

Frequently I have started technical, architectural, business documents in my local org file, and once I'm happy with it, exported to markdown for upload to the team wiki.

It is a hard sell for group collaboration, compared to, say, markdown. But I would also say that such things are very context-dependent and group policy-driven. e.g. I know of one or two groups that foreswore markdown for ASCIIDOC as their standard text format for collaboration.

writing in org just to export to markdown sounds very silly. what's the point? Emacs has markdown-mode.

That would indeed be silly.

Funny, I did it in both my current and previous job.

Wrote first draft in org, exported to docx. Then every time someone made a change, I'd export back to org and version control it. The other party never had any idea. It was much easier seeing the changes he made by diffing the org files than by using Word's track changes mode.

Just write it in Word in the first place. Seems like org just adds a step to your process, and the benefit is nebulous. Further, regenerating in org destroys reviewer comments, which you should preserve until you are done iterating.

Why should I collaborate with someone on my personal notes and GTD tasks?

The magic moment for me with org-mode was when I realized you could collect TODOs out of comments in code... in addition to calendar... in addition to "second brain" note taking... in addition to the fact the files were just text... and could be managed nicely with git... At this point, I've moved on from Emac for code editing, but I still use org-mode.

I'm sorry to say that Notepad, then Notepad++, have been my tools of choice for nearly 20 years.

To-do lists, work journals (immensely useful as a knowledge base especially in short gigs), assignments, coding, the lot.

I wrote most of my 90,000-odd word doctoral thesis in it.

Notepad++ supports tons of keyboard shortcuts and has useful plugins.

I can write neat LaTeX in it. I write research papers with it. It will save into any format I want and open almost any format I give to it.

It is that simple, and that convenient, that I will never ever change tool, and no amount of write-ups of alternative personal knowledge bases on HN (and there are many, oh so many) will convince me otherwise.

OP here. I agree!

The not so subtle meta-point of my post is to create a system around one's personal workflows and tastes. As I've stated in the post, orgmode was easy access for me because I was already using Emacs as my daily driver. Before my Emacs days, were my MS Office days, during which time OneNote was my go-to corporate survival tool and daily driver.

Sounds like you've sorted yourself out handsomely.

This is, ah, noteworthy :)

I love Org Mode too, but I still haven't pried myself entirely away from OneNote. There is still just too much stuff in my OneNote silo, and Office Lens is too convenient for capturing paper-bound information. I've settled into a hybrid workflow which keeps my vast Org Mode database at the center but retains use of OneNote.

I'll also upvote the mention of BrainTool. It's so damned good!

OP here. OneNote was my daily driver, in my Windows-usin' days. Footnote #1 might interest you :)

https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...

Funny, I'm using Doom Emacs and I just tried Org Mode for the first time, for a simple note (M-x org-add-note); wrote the note and then finished with `C-c C-c`, I have no idea where it went! :) Love it when I push myself to explore a new tool. (The only clue that I have is that the command description says: "Add a note to the current entry".)

Welcome to the org life :)

I don't use Doom, but it seems to have pre-configured location for the default orgmode file, which, of course you can change at will.

ref: https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/modules/lang/org/#/configu...

Thanks! I'll try reading their manual (or follow some tutorial). For now, I'll be using Org-roam[0], seems to be much simpler [route] to add and find notes and it even comes with first class support for Doom (see "Using Doom Emacs" section)!

- [0]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

I know HN loves org-mode, and so I, but goddamn it, it is 2023 and there still no sane good-enough parser for org-mode?

I'd love an LSP-mode for org. But that may be difficult, because the formal grammar is quite vast. ref:

A formal grammar for Org: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-04/msg...

There is a tree-sitter parser in the works and neovim plugin is already using it.

I think that makes more sense than full blown LSP.

True, but why not wish for the whole kitchen sink? :)

But on a more serious note, would you agree that an LSP server at par with Emacs Org Mode will validate the sufficiency of a standard grammar?

That in turn will allow all sorts of apps to bloom. Right now everyone is having to roll their own for whatever subset of org they choose to support. And the fact of having to roll one's own is the limiting factor for feature support. Which isn't terrible, because partial compatibility can work just fine.

There is though: https://github.com/tecosaur/Org.jl

Julia? Odd choice for that, but cool regardless.

I've heard its parsing abilities are (almost) on par with Perl.

Oh, I hadn't heard that. All I know is math guys really like it for some reason.

I was honestly impressed when I started writing my blog posts in org-mode for Hugo, and accidentally placed the .org file in my content directory, forgot to export it to Markdown, and it actually showed up on my blog. I was like "surely I must've rendered it and forgot" but nope, it just reads basic .org files on its own. Kinda neat.

Hugo uses go-org [1] which is pretty decent. I use that on its own in a pi for a lightweight webserver for my notes.

[1] https://github.com/niklasfasching/go-org

Your tag links (well, _the_ foss tag link) is missing a slash character, so the link is broken.

Uh oh. Thanks for telling me. I decided to start my site over from scratch, so it's very barebones right now.

Python has a decent one. For people who like orgmode, python and jinja2, I built a command line templater using it:

https://hitchdev.com/orji/

I use to to generate nicely formatted latex letters, resume, markdown for uploading to a website, etc.

It is in the workings, since the grammar was separated out. All other tools are free to implement a parser. It takes time and interest of people developing other tools. I think there is at least some development going on to have good org-mode support in VIM.

I've used the Haskell one for some stuff:

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/org-mode

Sadly noweb tangling isn't very well implemented for any parsers I know of.

Late to the conversation but in case the OP is still listening - great post and I'm totally aligned with your thinking. You mentioned my app, BrainTool, in the post (thanks for the inbound link!) so I thought you might be interested in my own rant on the topic: https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...

Cheers,

My favorite part about org-mode is that I can start with a technical outline and simply convert parts of it into tasks, which will appear in my agenda. It is so useful in my daywork that I cannot go back to omnifocus, which I used for many years and which has a better sync and mobile story.

> Version-controlled and Highly Reproducible: I can go back to any saved version of any of the org files above, and reliably reproduce output for "distribution" (PDF, tex, HTML etc.). In other words, it is all highly reproducible.

I love org-mode, I've lived the org-mode life, I ran a consultancy entirely off of it (time tracking, invoicing, task list management), I wrote a book in it... But boy, it was not reproducible. It is maybe salvageable because it's plaintext. It's definitely easy to version control. But tons of stuff, including e.g. details of how exports and tangling worked, broke between org versions.

TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode.

I tried it for a while but ran into similar issues. Ultimately I settled on a plain text file with the only format being ISO dates alone on a line for date tags. Daily entries since 2010 :-)

Thanks for the experience report. May I include it in my post?

Better still, if you've blogged about it, I will be happy to link across, in context.

You are correct in ascribing my enthusiasm to a narrow use-case.

Sure! I didn't blog about it, but it is in the issue tracker of e.g. https://github.com/crypto101/book.

> TL;DR: I love org but I think this is overstated unless you use a pretty small, vanilla subset of org-mode.

Maybe this is changing? I pretty heavily use noweb features for instance.

Hm, it seems like you mean reproducability of export though which I don't use as much.

It would be nice if it was as easy to use as VSCode / Obsidian, but alas. I will not learn a second language for using it and I will not paste mystery snippets from blogs and other sources to get something done.

I've tried org-mode a couple of time since people who use it rave about it so much, but it hasn't really stuck. Currenly I code/take quick notes in neovim, do some of the more serious writing in Obsidian, and general long-term notes are kept in notion. I would love to get into org-mode, to centralize all of these sources. Has anyone found themselves feeling the same way?

You should give https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim a try if you aren't currently. It isn't perfect, but I enjoy writing my notes in neovim more than the Obsidian app, so this works quite nicely.

My live demoscene version of using org looks like this (including demofails, which we don't worry about because we have probably already published the blog post version :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A

This blog would benefit from a bit more line spacing.

Thanks for the note. Please could you send me a screenshot (email in profile), and perhaps some detail on your device + os + browser combination?

I've aimed for density, and proportions defined under a modular scale. As far as I've seen it appears to work as I want it to (my devices, friends' devices) --- body text lines are compact but not squashed.

Ref: https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css

  line-height: var(--scale-l);
  font-size: var(--scale-l);

I will think about it... there are some other typographic niggles I should like to fix. Maybe this will be my excuse :)

Not sure but these serif fonts need to breathe more. This is an iPhone 14.

Agreed on that. I had to take a break from reading this post just because of how unreadable that blog UI is

Wish there was a better org mode plugin in vs code.

Yeah I recently had a teammate that wanted to collaborate with an org-roam I made public for my teammates.

We evaluated the org mode plugins for vscode and even the very important use case of folding/unfolding headings was pretty bad.

Went like this:

teammate: vscode org plugins can't even fold/unfold with good bindings? teammate: What shortcuts do you use for folding/unfolding" me: tab and shift-tab teammate: just give me basic emacs

So I setup a basic emacs config with context-menu-mode and recommended learning these shortcuts:

- TAB/shift-tab for folding/unfolding

- alt arrow keys for moving up/down and promoting/demoting

- ctrl+enter for making a new heading

and the guiding principle of "if you get confused go to the menu bar" or look at the ugly but helpful context-sensitive toolbar.

org mode is a flexible structure for plain text file format, composed of some simple, versatile or structure....

Placebo of the day, pick one at random:

- Zettelkasten

- Pomodoro

- Org mode

- 4 day work weeks

"It's all in your head bro. Keeping track of things the way you find most effective isn't important."

Let me add a note here to my zettelkasten orgmode pomodoro: "write clever reply on HN". That will do.

I feel like org mode has almost become a joke it’s so oversold as the answer to all of life’s note taking problems. Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book and start presenting something they made in emacs…

I think we all know using difficult tools tickles our programmer brains, but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?

At the end of the day it’s just text. Not that different from markdown.

All code is just text...

Big org-enthusiast here, but need to defend markdown. Plenty of folks have workflows that allow for inline execution in markdown. Babel is WAY more powerful, but markdown is fine for most code snippets.

Markdown does not have the same overlap with org-mode. Many use it more like a Jupyter notebook. External work flows would not be considered part of Markdown per se.

#+call: something(foo=bar, list=baz[,0]) this level of features just does not exist in Markdown.

Just not what it was designed for.

It just depends on what you’re trying to do. That could easily be done with Python and your favorite pip packages in a markdown code block, including the export (and importing a list of servers from another named markdown block).

The benefits of org and babel are precisely that you can do it in whatever language you’ve written the rest of your literate programming document.

As with most of these spectrums, markdown is less powerful and less complicated. Babel is one of the more confusing parts of org mode.

I've never seen that done in CSS either. Why? Because that's not what CSS is for.

Well put. Markdown was not designed for the sorts of things Org-mode excels at.

I (mis)interpreted the previous edit of your comment to be making exactly the opposite point.

That example is part of the tooling, not the format. One can do the same with markdown, just write the tool for it. Obsidian.md, a popular markdown-environment for example, has many extensions doing stuff like this. Similar has VS Code.

It's still in beta, but Logseq supports org-mode formatted notes and runs on mobile platforms. I just sync it to my computers. You can do it yourself, but they also offer a service.

Giving presentations from org mode is sweet, because you can execute any code or examples right from the slides. Management doesn't need to know what the underlying tech is.

Having a Google Docs like platform would be very cool though. I'm surprised there isn't a secure P2P framework that can do this in a browser yet.

Overleaf for Latex is cool, but something that could operate on any plain text file like Markdown, org-mode, or Yaml seems like a cool idea: I suppose VSCode kinda supports this idea at the moment with extensions and remote sessions.

I guess the main advantage of org is Emacs itself - it's infinitely customizable and you can quickly hack automation and workflows. That doesn't exist in anything else as far as I know.

If you just want to get stuff done, then something like Obsidian/Bear is really good. I actually swapped from many years of org-mode/roam to Obsidian myself about 6 months ago. My main reason was mobile integration like you mention. Obsidian sync is actually magic for me, a bit like Dropbox was for files.

You made a big jump from note taking to presenting something from a pine book. (And I’m upset by your comment because it’s ignorant.) The article’s author is much further down the rabbit hole than most.

People don’t use org mode because it tickles their brain; I don’t at least. I use it, just to take notes and manage tasks, because nothing else worked. I didn’t start using org mode planning to be a devotee. It was just another iteration of trying a note-taking and time management solution. Noteable other failed approaches include Todoist, an old school paper agenda and notebooks, or an attempt at using the iPhone’s built-in reminders and notes. Finally I’ve stuck with something. It’s a testament to how good org is that it delivered enough value while I was still picking up Emacs (for the purpose of using org) that I stuck with it.

Contrary to your point about org mode getting negative comments from management, my notes and scheduling in an org doc have gotten praise from my managers during Zoom screen shares. It probably only evokes comments because it’s different (as opposed to particularly impressive) but they are definitely positive comments.

What didn't work for you with Todoist? I'm using along side orgmode to quickly write down tasks on my phone.

Todoist was too much of its own ecosystem. (I use reminders for mobile task generation because Im comfortable in Apple’s ecosystem.) I wasn’t willing to learn the Todoist ecosystem with the risk of them changing it on a whim. (I’m also elisp-savvy so I can hack org mode to do exactly what I want, but that’s not the real issue/selling point.)

It’s mostly not wanting to learn Todoist. I’d rather learn org mode knowing it’s mature. It drives me nuts when corps change the tools I use. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, you know? The risk of having a workflow-breaking change at an annoying time stresses me too much. Org mode changes at a much slower pace, and it’s much easier to use an older version of org while I adapt to the changes.

There’s definitely nothing I do in org that can’t be done in Todoist. So theoretically Todoist would actually be better right now because of the mobile integration. I really like knowing that there’s a lot of room to grow with org mode, though. The workflow I aspire to is much more possible with org mode in the long run.

I am not a user of orgmode, but: Managers would not have an opinion on the technical tools used for a presentation but would rather focus on important things, like clarity of message, tempo etc. But even if they do have an opinion, who cares?

> the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices.

Isn't it incredible that we've lost the ability, as a culture, to be on top of things without our pocket supercomputers?

I don't need org mode on my phone. I dont need it on every device I own. I use org mode on my PC, and if I need any form of portability I can jot stuff down on a little piece of paper.

Also, it's just text. We have countless services that can synchronize plain text files. Stop being whiney and pick one.

> And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book

Stop being so snotty.

> and start presenting something they made in emacs…

Yeah, I love an editor talk actually. Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

I’d never heard it put that way, that presenting in an editor is a strong no-bullshit signal, but how true is this!

I had a professor who would teach from Emacs. She would store each section of the lecture in a register and paste as she went. (Watching her cursor flit around the buffer was actually strong encouragement for me to learn Emacs; it was nice to see how deftly it could be done without interrupting the flow of the lecture.)

She had slides too, but obviously being in Emacs for these portions allowed interactive displays of code execution.

> Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

I think there are two kinds of bullshit relevant to meetings. One is spin or dishonesty, and the other is wasting people's time. Presenting with an editor can mean that what's about to be presented is honest and straight-forward, being grounded in the actual matter being discussed. Or it can mean that an engineer did zero prep for the meeting.

Here is Rich Hickey doing a conference talk in orgmode ;) https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376

> I don't need org mode on my phone. ... little piece of paper.

And then type that back on a computer? No, thanks, no desktop-oriented note format is ever worth going back that deep into the caves

Do you really have that long of notes that summarizing your handwritten note into a couple sentences max, and serializing it into org-mode is such a travesty?

It really seems like people hate org-mode just to hate it, because they've heard so much praise that there needs to be some sort of counter-culture. Even if it doesn't actually make sense.

People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

They are noting a serious gap in its capabilities. I say this as a long-term org user, too -- I've tried to mobile tools, and they don't work for me.

Org is great if you live in emacs and have no need or desire to access that corpus of data when you're not sitting at a computer. But in 2023, that's a pretty serious drawback, and pretending it isn't is a weird look.

Yeah, I suppose if someone really needs that capability, then Org (at least currently) isn't the markup for them.

I mostly referring to the "why do people keep bringing it up - it's such a joke" aspect. Well, it's obviously because lots of people find it awesome and more than adequate.

> People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

Org-mode files are text files. Anything that can sync text files will happily sync them. Anything that can edit text files can happily edit them. Sure, emacs is the best way to work with org files, but nothing is stopping you from syncing it with whatever you want (I use Nextcloud) and editing it with whatever you want.

I feel like this is such a key feature of org mode that people are missing. It isn't magic. It's just text, with a buttload of convenience functions that happen to be written in elisp.

...and to which you have no access in a non-emacs environment, which is why "it's text! just sync and open in whatever!" isn't a good mobile answer.

The inability to fold headings alone is a dealkiller, and enough reason to look for something else. Which is why Obsidian is so interesting to a lot of folks who use orgmode but are not attached to emacs at a religious level.

I don't have long notes precisely because I haven't ignored progress and try to use a pocket computer. Also, what's your theory of communication that explains why people casually dismiss serious flaws and switch the discussion to people and culture?

Will I still be able to use Bear in 2033? I'm pretty sure I will still be able to use org mode and emacs. I agree org mode is not very good for collaboration but for that I think really things like Google keep and Google docs are much easier. I liked Wunderlist for that but alas it's gone.

Wunderlist lives on, rebranded as Microsoft ToDo. As far as I can tell it's the exact same product, same feature set, etc. I think they made the transition unnecessarily clunky, but it's all there.

They closed the API's I used to sync with org mode.

That does suck.

> Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices

https://plainorg.com author here. Got plenty of happy iOS users doing those things.

Thanks for making plainorg! I had listed it in my (hopefully incomplete) list of org-compatible tools in the post :)

cf. the section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...

Thank you! =)

You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools.

This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use.

Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs.

This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

I'd rather say that phones aren't a good tool for Org-mode: they are very challenged at text input (no keys) and interfaces that avoid text with buttons, dragging, and other reliable gestures have the advantage of minimizing the text and quasi-text input that is the backbone of Org-mode and Emacs in general.

That's a long way of saying that you don't think of phones as a legitimate use case, but the rest of the world mostly disagrees with you.

I've got ten years of orgmode buffers and I'm actively working to transition to Obsidian because the mobile story is so much better. With plugins like tasks, dataview, and outliner, I can do pretty much anything in Obsidian I could do in Org, and I can do it on my iPad without having to SSH to my Linode instance first.

that's powerful.

How does the outliner obsidian plugin compares to orgmode? My biggest use case for orgmode is as an outliner for projects and the features you can use while outlining like dates, deadlines, schedules, todos, lists, progress indicators for lists and todos, agenda view, notes in outlines headings etc... also how easy is to move outlines around with the keyboard, how you can focus one outline into a new buffer, it's pretty convenient.

It works pretty well for my use case, but its behavior is different in a significant way that I'm hoping will be corrected by an option or by a more org-mode-minded alternative.

In Org, we can do things like this:

  * Outline element
    text under this element
  ** Child of outline element
      some text that belongs to the child element

etc.

The outliner plugin for Obsidian is "outline only," if you take my meaning, so there's no provision for non-outline text in the outline.

Thanks and yeah, being able to put text under the outline is like the most important feature for me and it's where most outliners fall short.

Agreed. It's what put me off most OTHER outliners, and what eventually drove me from my prior organizational tool. Omnifocus, a Mac tool initially based on the well-loved (and generally excellent) OmniOutliner, had that limitation. I was looking for something where I could seamlessly co-mingle notes AND actions I needed to take, and that would then give me a dynamic view that collated all the actions for me when I wanted it.

Basically, in my imagination, I invented Orgmode and agendas, so I was super happy to discover that it already existed. That capability is weirdly rare in note tools and outliners. (I'm honestly still amazed that OneNote doesn't have this feature -- it seems like a complete no-brainer, and yet...)

Anyway, it's also a simple enough mod of the existing outliner plug-in that I'm hoping someone like me (ie, coming from org) will introduce it as an alternative plug-in. Honestly, a plug-in that would just parse the basics of org markup would be awesome -- with dataview, I don't need it to be capable of agendas or anything. I just want the markup & the outliner behavior.

I use org-mode but my understanding is that logseq does what you need and it has phone apps.

logseq seems weird and unfinished, and doesn't have the plugin support / customization support of Obsidian, so it's a nonstarter for me.

If you are an Emacs user, saying the rest of the world is wrong is pretty easy.

Org is not perfect by any means. It crashes occasionally and is sometimes laggy.

I think it's fair to say that for the task of markup only, Markdown is lighter weight and it makes sense that it's implemented (slightly differently) nearly everywhere.

On the other hand, org-mode replaces Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things. This is why I keep using org-mode - not because it's better at markup, but because it's "good enough" at markup, and simultaneously "good enough" at many other things.

I mostly use org-mode on a computer, with a screen and a keyboard. Markdown uses fewer characters for some things like code blocks (source blocks in org-mode), that is true. That said, not only does org replace Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things, it also has markup capabilities, which are simply lacking in Markdown (common mark if you want). For example checklists. Or citation. Or datetimes. Or spreadsheets. Or inclusion of other documents/files at a specifiable heading level. Or tagging of headings. Or marking headings "TODO", "DONE" and similar.

Many things in org-mode are modifiable. For example the "status" of a heading like "TODO", "DONE" and so on. You can add new words in document wide properties at the top of an org file.

I know there are markdown dialects, that partially cover this or that feature, but none to cover all that org provides out of the box.

The org format is much more suitable for any technical or scientific or academic document, that has any slightly raised requirements. In Markdown one often finds oneself using workarounds to make something look nice in the rendered output. Similar to how restructuredtext is powerful and can be used for academic paper writing and all that. Markdown is merely the lowest common denominator, too minimalistic for my taste. Good for a chat or messenger, but not really for good technical documents.

I still have to see a tool for writing markdown, that works as nicely as tooling for org-mode in Emacs, with all the things like changing heading levels for 1 heading or a whole subtree and export buffer or subtree, or cut visible or subtree, widen, narrow, folding, and all those nice things.

> but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

Speaking from an android perspective:

Best is organice (but requires local android webdav server if you don't want to connect to github) for most people design-wise I think.

Others will prefer orgzly.

> This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

emacs is available on fdroid now and using a bluetooth keyboard it's a good experience. I hope to improve the touch experience, for instance I recently released a library to make clocking in/out on mobile or just by mouse easier:

https://github.com/ParetoOptimalDev/org-inline-clocking-butt...

I intend to try and make org-mode usable by touch in emacs on android eventually, but it'll be slow and according to things I really need as I need them.

Never heard of Bear before, but it looks fundamentally unusable to me: limited platform support, possibly requiring serverside storage, charging for encryption, so if you're a free user don't expect notes to be private. I honestly find the concept of charging for note-taking software offensive. It's simple text, storage space is not a meaningful concern, serverside storage is fundamentally unnecessary and a security/privacy concern.

This in my mind is just sloppy, overcomplicated, rent-seeking crap. It fails to meet even a single of the fairly rudimentary features i need for note-taking. Even a terrible text editor like nano would be more useful.

Yeah just checked Bear out, it can't even fold headlines.

There is a way to make slide decks using org mode and they actually look pretty professional. Go watch any David Wilson stream on YouTube.

"System Crafters" is the Youtube channel referenced: https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists

Just the thought of having some product manager trying to determine how a productivity app I use fits into their business objectives is reason enough to use something like org-mode. If there is a joke, I think it would be all the churn that "conventional" productivity apps have gone through. I used Evernote before switching to org-mode. The Evernote interface is completely unrecognizable and many vital features have been taken away. Not only that, I'm sure that in a few years it will change even more. Bear may have a more user-friendly product direction but they're still a business trying to make profit. Will the Bear service work in 10 years? Maybe. Will I be able to find a synchronization solution for my org-files? almost certainly.

Emacs for Android! It's a thing.

Back in 2017 I presented a new internal product to some VPs, most of whom I'd never met before, from org-mode source with slides via org-reveal. That remains one of the two or three most highly lauded presentations I've yet given, in a career now heading toward its 25th year.

Org is easier to use and more capable now than it was then, and so is the tooling around it. That includes mobile; most, maybe all, of the apps linked from the article didn't exist back then, and there are several others not mentioned there. The community's grown significantly, too.

So I'm not sure what point you think you're making here, but what I'm hearing is that you don't feel the need to have any familiarity with a technology before offhandedly dismissing it as meme nonsense apparently on the strength of a lot of people trying it and finding it good enough to be worth talking about. I wouldn't be comfortable with making such a showing of myself, but tastes differ, I suppose.

This comment reminds me of the negative reaction on the Nokia story a few days ago where they announced they'd be making phones with replaceable parts.

"Who even needs a phone that doesn't have top-of-the-line imaging sensors! Are you going to take your engagement photos on that?"

Completely missing the point.

Funny, I've authored probably half of my presentations at work since around 2016 using Org. Either export to Beamer or use org-reveal. No one cares.

Of course, Powerpoint is superior in some ways, so I still use it. And if the manager needs a document he can make changes to, then I'll use Powerpoint. But these are exceptions, not the rule.

> but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?

Only works on Apple? A non-starter for me. I type way better on a keyboard on my Linux machine, so any note taking app needs to work on it. And Org mode has been around for 20 years. I have notes I wrote almost 15 years ago in it. I want some guarantee that whatever tool I use will work 20 years from now.

As a general rule, if you have to pay for a niche tool to use it, do not expect it to last two decades.

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