Notes on Emacs Org Mode
lwn.net
lwn.net
I tried to use org-roam, but it's too complex to adopt my already written notes to the org-roam format and structure.
My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistance of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).
I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.
Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.
> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.
1)You can use org-mode outside Emacs. See for example Logseq (https://logseq.com/), organice (https://organice.200ok.ch/) or EasyOrg.
2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.
3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.
a) have too much time or b) have too little time
a) because I found it to be quite a time-consuming to set up a configuration that adapts to my needs (event though I restrict myself to note taking and managing todos all from one file) and b) it is such an amazing tool for keeping all my notes and todos in reach within seconds
Its agenda supports searching on time which is handy.
Can you explain? I mean, I imagine there aren't really various flavors of Org Mode, but that doesn't make it standardized.
> I imagine there aren't really various flavors of Org Mode, but that doesn't make it standardized.
All the implementations that call themselves org-mode follow the conventions set by the canonical implementation - the Emacs org-mode. While this may not sound like a good reason to call it standardized, the practical implication is a vast difference from what you get with various markdown flavors. In the latter case, the only way to make sure that your markdown is correct is to test it with the target implementation.
The second reason is that there is an actual effort to standardize org-mode - called Orgdown [1]. Org-mode is already more or less uniform across implementations. This effort tries to write it down as a reference. Markdown has a similar effort called CommonMark. But if you want to know why it's different, you have to look at the history of why it isn't called 'Standard Markdown'.
If you use Emacs, you will have great editor with powerful preview features (images, formatting, table processor with formulae, code execution inside the text), and the pipeline for generating HTML or PDF will be approximately the same as with .md/.rst (org-mode is even supported by GitLab and GitHub web interface, although not perfectly). But the support of the org-mode outside Emacs is worse than of Markdown and reStructuredText.