Hacker News Reader

Comment by ithrow | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com