Getting Organized with Org Mode | Hacker News Reader

Getting Organized with Org Mode

correl.phoenixinquis.net

186 pointscorrelr44 comments

With a very little bit of tinkering, org-mode is pretty great for code auditing. I have a keybinding set to add bookmarks to code, and some simple tools for easily adding out-of-band notes/comments. That, plus org-mode's native todo/prioritization.

Using it for code auditing is a great idea. I use it heavily as my "issue tracker / task manager" for projects tool w/ bookmark capturing for issues (that combined with git-blame-mode is pretty amazing).

Any chance that you can write a little bit more about this? I've dug my old Emacs config files some time ago and now when evil-mode gives such an awesome alternative to Vim (at least at my skill level), I'm using Emacs for most of my daily text editing.

I've used org-mode previously and even though I didn't had a chance to dig into it, I've seen a lot of potential there.

I'm working on a blog post about it now (unfortunately, I've been doing that for about 3 months now).

In that case, how about throwing here just a quick list of features/tools you're using for this?

Seconded, as this sounds very interesting.

org-capture

I use org-mode rather extensively in my own day-to-day work. I really like the table support! I create my time-sheets from my task lists and format it for HTML export.

I even publish books with it.

It's really powerful.

I've written articles and scripts with it.

In grad school, its support for LaTeX was clutch in Algorithms class where all the assignments were laden with mathematical symbols.

It's not nearly as powerful as Org itself, but I've knocked up an org-a-like at http://yipgo.com that might interest people.

I like the design. I'm working on a similar service to bring org-mode to more people other than Emacs geeks (similar to how Slack brought IRC to a wider audience).

Current productivity tools fall quite short in comparison.

To give you a kick start; things I would consider for Yipgo 2.0:

* Lots of people understandably don't trust an unknown company/person with their potentially secret TODO lists - add dropbox/drive support from the offset. Also means emacs/vim users can hack the files directly.

* "Normal" people like the agenda and wish they could interact with the items from it - defeats the point, but after yipgo was on lifehacker, I picked up a new type of non-technical user who now make up the majority of my users.

* Make sure it's mobile friendly (turns out the editor I chose doesn't work properly on Android, or at all on IOS).

* Possibly a Yipgo 3.0 thing, but people editing at the same time, ala docs, would be great (something I've wanted).

Actually, if you want to get in touch to see if we can combine forces drop me a mail, phil at apiaxle.com. I'd quite like to monetize the service if possible.

I have been meaning to work on something like this too. My email is in my profile if either one of you is interested in collaborating.

IMO if you don't trust an unknown person with your potentially secret TODO list, then you shouldn't trust Dropbox, Google, Amazon or Microsoft either.

My secrets are on an air-gaped fully encrypted PC. Apart keeping everything in my head this is the best I can come with, but it's still not secure enough for my liking, especially since the whole Truecrypt debacle the doubts are killing me.

I would have thought that the case too, but it really is my number one request from people. I guess Dropbox and co. put a lot of effort, money and people into security making them the better of the two options.

Org-mode can be used without being an emacs geek though. The wife of the friend of mine who first showed me emacs and org uses it as a self-management / note-keeping application, and whilst she might be at least slightly geeky, she's not really a tech person.

Once I found out how much you can really do with it, I went on a prosetylizing spree and got a couple of friends as well as my little brother into it. Whilst they're somewhat tech inclined, they're by no means emacs geeks, but they got into it after me showcasing and explaining at least some of the features.

Personally, i think that the only thing that's really essential in getting people into it is a tutorial level to it, similar to interactive tutorials for programming languages (I recall a marvelous ruby one from a year or two back, but I'm unable to find it). Org-mode already scales beautifully regarding complexity, and i think the main thing that turns people away from it is that the manual is a literal textbook and only silly people study it back to back. Or that they're using vim and don't want to switch to emacs, but that's not likely the group of people you're targeting.

Just this week I started learning org-mode by reading one of Charle Cave's postings on how uses org-mode to implement the Getting Things Done methodology http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.h.... For me this has been a great tutorial.

That's great, looks really slick! I know you've posted what you'd consider for 2.0, if you are taking suggestions my ideal non-emacs org would be iOS compatible and sync with webDAV/Dropbox.

I have always wanted to use org mode, but it comes down to that I use more than one computer and might want to share my todos with people who are not emacs geeks: how do you guys handle these things?

Org mode files are plain text so your friends will see beautifully organized text files.

Haha, no they won't. They'll see weird stars everywhere and a confusing and weirdly indented chunk of text (they aren't using a monospaced font and their edi^H^H^Hword processor mangled the line wrapping).

At least that's been my entire experience. I wish that weren't true however, and it's not like other text markup formats are any better.

In addition to what LiveTheDream said, you can export to plain text with org-export-as-ascii.

And Pandoc is great (but not perfect) for two way conversions to/from various formats now that it supports org files.

I still keep all my stuff in org files, but it's only fair to warn people that these don't work very well as a format when sharing those files with people of arbitrary technical knowledge.

You can export org mode files as HTML, PDF, LaTex, even iCalendar. Try C-c C-e to see options.

Another useful export format is ODT (and probably ODF).

Ah but I would have to manually copy them between computers, right?

I have two approaches to this: for my own use on different computers, I have scripts that sync the files using git (really I should be using git-annex or dropbox or similar); for sharing to-dos and so on with other people, I use org-trello, and they use trello.

I had to deal with this situation in multiple levels. I manage an anime convention, involving many levels of people -- some wants them on calendar, some wants as a file like PDF, while I also wanted to provide web access to those info, and Org-mode fits nicely with this situation. (and I was a sole user of Emacs/Org-mode.)

As it's just a text data, Git worked great to keep it up to date.

Only thing is that I haven't yet to find the good way to handle automatically managing mutual links (auto generating link from A to B, when I link from B to A -- I'd actually like to know if there's any suggestions.), which would make this process much clean!

http://hideki.hclippr.com/2012/04/17/whitepaper-org-mode-at-...

I do exactly the same. Trying to replace Hansoft with Org-mode. And I'm super happy with my progress

I also use org-mode, mostly for writing documents. Customizing embedded code, referencing the lines and in the end publishing to beautiful pdf, html, markdown is really awesome.

Question: is it worth learning Emacs in order to use Org mode?

Learning is emacs is not a destination it is a journey.

The good news is you don't have to learn emacs to benefit from org-mode, give it a try. Print yourself the reference cards for emacs[1] and org-mode[2], go through the tutorial that shows up when you first launch emacs and you'll know enough to start using org-mode and make your own opinion.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf [2]: http://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf

PS: if you have vi/vim experience/preference you can put some evil in your emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

I've had my eye on OrgMode for awhile - it looks awesome. But I use Vim. Is there anything on Vim that compares to OrgMode?

There is a clone (https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer) but it seems a little abandoned to me right now.

VimOrganizer also REQUIRES a Emacs install for most interesting things.

https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/blob/master/INSTALL.tx...

It's also buggy as hell and has seemingly random keybindings chosen (and hard coded unfortunately).

Put simply: No, and there probably never will be. I was in the same situation, and eventually I just switched to Emacs. The switch is pretty easy with evil-mode, and spacemacs might make it even easier.

http://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

I suppose an Emacs user will find it anemic, but I use it happily every day.

Use Emacs for Orgmode and VIM as an editor.

Note that org mode is not just an outliner. Org mode is also a spreadsheet, a time tracker, a taggable and searchable database of arbitrary information, a literate programming system that can run code in dozens of languages and exchange data between them, and a document authoring system that supports a number of different backends such as HTML, LaTeX, and ODF.

There are Vim extensions for parts of this, but org mode is more than the sum of its parts. It is a universal information management system, developed with the express goal of being transparent and extensible. It really is a marvellous piece of software.

You can use evil-mode[0] in Emacs to have the best of both worlds

[0] https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home

I'd just bite the bullet and install emacs. You don't need to move all your text editing work there immediately, doing [Alt]-x org-mode in a new buffer and playing around with features such as headlines (type * ) or todo's (type TODO in a headline) should be enough to get started. You can always refine your workflow in Org further, so there really isn't a minimum amount of things you need to know or learn.

There is also https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki for writing notes and https://github.com/vimoutliner/vimoutliner for outlining.

I actually like the viki and vikitasks plugins a lot. Unfortunately, its html/pdf/docbook converter doesn't work with current versions of ruby.

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