Org Mode Release 8.0 | Hacker News Reader

Org Mode Release 8.0

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133 pointscdkamat40 comments

I love org-mode. I have never found an online todo-list or task manager that I like to use... but plain-text lists fit my mental model perfectly. org-mode is plain text on steroids... also the clocking abilities while doing tasks is incredible.

Yup, me too. I use it exclusively to manage all my ongoing projects, whether related to programming or not. The way it handles contexts (I do it via tags), ToDo keywords, numerous custom agenda views, is just plain awesome!

Just the other day I was thinking of a good web front, which can be made for org files which are in Dropbox or something. Then, when on a computer with emacs, those files can be edited via emacs and otherwise, via the web app. This would also help in bringing other non emacs people on the orgmode wagon.

this! an online editor would be so great

Like this?

http://www.ymacs.org/demo/

There is a quite neat Org Mode parser on CPAN.

I started doing a webapp like you talk about, since I needed to learn JavaScript. I call it Attorg, "atto org". I never planned on doing more than an absolutely minimal feature list, since people can use a terminal implementation in the browser (for e.g. Babel).

But I began a new job a month ago. The web side is at most half done for MVP. The server side is three pages of code (using said CPAN module).

My use case was a nicer and simple version for my iPad than the normal iPhone/iPad app. I never figured out how to do a nice menu system for commands, most of it is ~ normal key codes.

Since it is Emacs related, it will be the latest GPL, of course.

I'll try to get it up on GitHub or something this weekend. If you post an email in your profile I'll send you the address.

(Note what I wrote -- I'm a JavaScript beginner; the less than 40 pages of "Attorg" is ~ half of all JavaScript I've ever written! Also, it really need lots of loving from someone that has taste... [Edit: Both UI and UX.])

Disclaimer: This is so true... http://search.cpan.org/~sharyanto/Org-Parser-0.30/lib/Org/Pa...

Edit: Clarity.

I have put up my email address. Would love to look into it!

I'll have to do a raincheck (i.e. too little rain). Between the new job and the girlfriend (well, "ladyfriend") -- no open source this weekend.

If I can't get it done the next weekend I'll pack it up and email it to you. :-(

Just the basic files. :-(

https://github.com/berntb/attorg/

The server Perl code doesn't do much except load an org file into the javascript side.

It needs Twitter Bootstrap + FontAwesome.

I'll update it to a working installation a coming weekend, must sleep now...

Org is very active, high profile project, the number of changes from previous major release are just amazing.

git diff release_7.01 release_8.0 --stat [snip] 352 files changed, 119010 insertions(+), 80849 deletions(-)

Org has 352+ files? I plead ignorance, but that strikes me as absurd.

The emacs lisp tradition (or at least this is how I see it) splits functionality among files. As explained in the changes, there are files like ob-julia.el to work with the Julia programming language in Babel (literate proframming system in org) There is a file for language, for example. There's also the documentation and auxiliary files. I don't see where the problem is, org is huge but easily hackable due to this splitting

Org 7.9.2 (the version I have installed here) is 113 emacs lisp files, for a total of 85k LoC and slightly over 3 MB of code.

I'm not exactly sure what that git diff --stat command pasted above actually compared, but I don't think it's correct.

Well why don't you look at them to find out why before you say stuff like that. It isn't exactly a fucking secret. It is quite small at the core and the rest of it is giving added value, like interaction with python, java etc and the large range of output formats etc. Just like a great many software solutions.

http://orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org-mode.git/tree/lisp?id=5ef07d...

A) Correct, you are ignorant to think it's absurd.

B) 7.01 was released almost three years ago. A number of things have changed in that period of time, and it's reasonable to expect that 352 files were created, edited, deleted, etc.

Working with people who use org-mode to schedule and sort their daily professional activities with it when you're not is... quite an interesting experience.

I remember this guy popping up every time on the channel right at 3:00pm sharp, as planned. Another dev used to say 'org-mode tells me that I need to talk to you now'.

For the semi-unsupervised messy crowd out there, I thought I would give a pointer to Basket intead, http://basket.kde.org/ Less powerful than org though!

Basket was a pretty nice replacement for (some features of) OneNote. However development seems to have stopped on it. The last release was in 2010 unless I am mistaken.

Org-mode is a package for Emacs which supports tree outlines in plain text mode, plus a ton of features.

It is intended to cover the ground between what you would write in a notepad during a meeting, and a fully-fledged "reproducible science" notebook.

If you find Org-mode hard/complicate to use, you could skip the agenda and export function, they are the most difficult part in Org-mode. But if you only use Org-mode to keep/organize notes or make outlines, it is a perfect tool.

Some other application could handle the agenda part and integrate with your OS better, like Omnifocus etc.

But the user experience of MobileOrg (the mobile client of Org-mode) is not very well, it may be the only weak point I could see.

Org mode... The only reason I keep coming back to emacs, despite my love of Vim. I've tried the vim "alternatives", and they just don't go anywhere close to good old org mode.

The one thing that I'd really like to see, is a properly made, polished mobile companion app.

ox-rss.el - What a surprise! Nice..

M-x org-publish-project RET blog RET

That plus TRAMP and you've got a full blog generated from org! Now to hack up ox-rss.el and make a ox-feed.el that does atom..

No need for TRAMP. https://github.com/juanre/org-jekyll

org is to outliners what emacs is to text editors.

confusing and overfeatured?

Different from each perspective! For handsome, smart, educated, awesome, people such as myself, it is a lifetime of treasures, hidden within RSI-inducing key bindings, no matter where on the keyboard one puts C and M.

For leprous, primitivist, stinky, bottom-feeding, monkey-scratchers, it may be a befuddling plethora of options and flexibility that forces the user to form their own opinions regarding the pursuit of goals.

Plus, they both give me something to clean out and start over every ten to fifteen years.

I feel a bit filthy now after realizing my knowledge of named functions to M-x far outnumber the keybindings I've got down pat by a 10:1 ratio.

And yet I don't feel particularly encumbered. Call it a case of the customer only being able to think of a faster horse.

yes, but M-x letter letter TAB can work pretty well and is easy to get down pat.

ido and anything/helm are great for "just close enough" partial matching. Knowing that emacs can do something is just as good as knowing the key bound to the particular command.

Christ I've just tried out helm and it's simultaneously blowing me away and surprising me by exposing emacs builtins I'd never known about. It's far easier to recall objects to act on than named functions.

Yeah, it really helps with maintaining flow while also showing you things you never knew about. OK, sometimes the last part really screws up flow when you see dwim-finish-my-work in the completions list.

(The author of org-jekyll here). If anyone is going to try it out please note that there's an org-mode-8.0 branch that should work with the new org-mode release. As soon as I can test it with the new version I'll merge into master and will leave the current version as a branch.

I've never heard about org-mode before, but after checking this thread I had to give it a try.

This is exactly what I've been looking for for years. Fantastic stuff.

Org mode is nice but for most of the planning (TODOs, Agendas etc...) stuff isn't Google Calendar much better? As people share events/meetings/their calendars with me I need to use Google Calendar anyway, and since I'm using it anyway why use Org mode for this at all? Also google calendar syncs with my phone, acessible from any other computer etc..

EDIT: I updated and now the export-as-pdf and export-as-html (the only things I really used) are broken.

I'm interested in using org-mode to take notes in class. Anyone have any resources for getting started? I'm using latest OSX.

The easiest thing to do is to install a variant of emacs on your machine (aquamacs is fine but stuck at version 23 of emacs). It probably comes with org already at this point.

I assume the things you'll want to track are facts and tasks. You'll want to capture as quickly as possible for later organization.

It really is as simple as typing to get started. Then you can go back later and re-organize your notes, tasks, etc. according to whichever system you prefer.

Some tutorials that seem to be well-paced for org newbies are available at http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/.

http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-... (old, but you probably want the basics to get hooked first :-))

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html (includes a good guide to the state of tasks, among lots of other things to orgify just about every aspect of your existence)

I like using homebrew (http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/) to install emacs.

To install a GUI version it's "brew install emacs --cocoa".

That's my preference as well, but integrating it with your app launcher of choice (among other things) can be a little more challenging. The alias in /Applications is a particular pain if you try to use Alfred or Spotlight, but maybe Quicksilver works fine. You only need to open emacs on startup anyway. :-)

I just mv the .app from the Cellar to /Applications so that spotlight can find it.

brew upgrade misses out then. I add Cellar/emacs to Alfred's search path and brew upgrade/cleanup more or less works fine.

The quite stable nightly builds of Aquamacs 3 are based upon emacs 24 and available here: http://aquamacs.org/nightlies.shtml

Just download Emacs from here: http://emacsformacosx.com

Org-mode is perfect for taking notes in class, especially if it's a programming class. In that case, you could use Org-Babel[1].

[1]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

I'll be the dick that suggests not using org mode for class notes; I typed up my lecture notes in it 4 years ago (for the class I teach) and there have been several backwards incompatible changes to org mode that required a few hours of debugging to get indenting, etc. to work correctly with my old files (yes, in a plain text outline).

Now, these are huge files, so my use case is pushing it, but you'll want to be able to use and modify your lecture notes for years, so I'd suggest something lighter weight like a plain markdown file.

Whatever you do, take care of version control and backup.

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