Org mode also has a great spreadsheet system[0], making it easy to work with plaintext tables! I used Org mode in a school assignment to generate a gnuplot graph from an Org data table (which also had calculated data using formulas). This all would happen all in Org at compile time, since Org lets you evaluate code snippets[1] as well. The final result is that the table, the graph and the syntax-highlighted gnuplot code would all be put in the LaTeX document, and updating the code or data would take effect immediately when recompiling the document.
There's also other cool things like a habit tracker[2] that can also show you an interactive mode where you can see your progress.
I've tried to use Org for a while. Actually had hundred of pages of notes written in its format. But it never felt right for me. You press the wrong keyboard button it tries to execute the code, you press another key - text gets reformatted, folds, unfolds, etc... It just doesn't feel text anymore and you have to know lots of complexity of the Org itself to make it useful. And all I want is just to write some text and display it. After all, just converted all .org to .md and use Hugo for displaying it in HTML.
Everytime I see an article about Org, I think how nice it would be to use it and feel comfortable in it, it just never worked out for me.
I was in the same boat until i realized emacs key bindings are not adhoc. It falls in to place once the basic emacs key binding conventions are understood.
Yes that is my problem as well. I love my org files but it is too easy to make a mistake that can really mess up your file, such as deleting a heading line accidentally will then file everything under the heading above it!
That's exactly why I built EasyOrg. It has a simple to use editor and an Agenda viewer. You can add, edit and delete org mode todos via a GUI or using the editor. For note taking you use the editor. No difficult Eamcs keybindings and buffers.
The agenda has several different views to help you prioritize what to work on next based on priorities and scheduled timestamps. You can also sort and filter.
It does not support all the Emacs org mode features, but supports the most common ones. The main focus of EasyOrg is on Todos and I tend to use one org file per project (mainly bigger projects, not the shopping list or to do around the house type of stuff). I used to use a regular text file to keep track of what to do for my projects, but with Org mode and EasyOrg's agenda it's easier to see what needs to be done and prioritize.
It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop. Feedback welcome!
You should check out vimwiki! I came from org-mode and have been using vimwiki the last three months now. It can do .md and export to html. I mainly use it for day to day notes and todo lists.
Never used org as it seems too complicated from the getgo. Although I feel exactly same as you and that's why I've decided to use some free time to build a tool that would help solving the abstract problem of "organising life" easily and efficiently. I plan to create something with the flexibility and convenience of a textedit but functionality of a full fledged personal management tool. Would be happy to share when its ready. https://forms.gle/Vexu6jaZBgnHRoCm7
Yeah, I think it could do with a modal interface: normal mode would perform tree-like operations and allow entering text. Insert mode would treat the entire file as plain text.
I've been slowly getting more and more into org over the years (decades, really). It's nice to just have a simple little text mode that results in easily readable text. Good for brainstorming and scribbling notes. Everything else is just icing.
1. Use org-mode in one file for a few years to track all of your todos. You can make a good David Allen GTD system this way. Headings for Inbox, Projects, Someday/Maybe, Tickler.
2. Discover https://www.orgroam.com/ as the best note taking and personal knowledge system you've ever seen.
3. Obsess about backing up all of your org files because if you ever lose them you will literally have lost half of what you know.
It's not perfect because the wrong keystroke sequence can cause you to lose a chunk of information in a way that goes unnoticed for a long period of time (or is just never noticed), but I run a cron job that just blindly checks in any new files and diffs into git every few minutes. It assuages at least some of my concerns about org-roam's many ways to cut myself with its magic.
In the first appoximation you can use org-mode the same way you'd use markdown -- merely for the syntax. But indeed, it shines when you use it within Emacs because you can extend it. Even the 'vanilla' setup is very powerful -- you get the markup, datetimes, todos, scheduling, agenda, clocking, literate programming, etc.
Spreadsheets.. personally, never had the need to use formulas, but they are very nice when you need.. well, to organize information in tables. For example, I'm using it with org-capture to track sleep data straight into the table, which results in a table row for each day (with an auto-generated timestamp).
I do not think the intention is at all to replace spreadsheets, if that is the concern. More, this is a great way to move some data through a series of exploratory questions without having to push the data through many other tools.
In large, it is Emacs taken to an extreme. With the major feature point that all cards are on the table. Meaning the file you get at the end, is just plain text. There is no need to ever worry about export of data being locked out from you. Yes, using it is currently best exemplified with Emacs. No, nothing is forcing that.
- teaching classes and grading students
- working on a quote / invoice for a customer (I add numeric properties to an org item, org gather them in a table, and I add columns to that to get sums, taxes, discounts, etc)
- designing my woodworking and other building stuff, for cutlist and so on
I am not the kind of guy that lives in emacs, I only use it for org mode, in a way that resembles a scientific notebook, mixing text, data and code.
I would not force it onto anyone, but using anything else feels backwards.
Spreadsheets can be surprisingly useful in a text document. For example, I regularly need to grade programming assignments. I do this in.a structured text document, with sub-headings per student and category, where I take notes about their work, and assign points.
So far, this could be easily done in markdown, or even plain text. But then I tally up the points, and convert them to a grade based on some simple equation in a table. My colleagues need to do this in a separate Excel sheet. I can do it right in my org document.
Org mode seems to be like Markdown in spirit - sometimes you are just writing stuff and realize that you need to do something slightly more complicated with a table than HTML and pure ASCII-art allow. Doing it in spreadsheet software entails either a workflow break or having to do over the rest of the document in a text processor.
My take: You're not going to be working with some 500 row monster etc. in Org, but if you just want to quickly do something like get the row-wise averages of a table, you can just do that in-place easily. The underlying math engine in Emacs is also pretty fancy, it can do stuff like symbolic algebra which I have yet to see in Excel :)
I think part of it at least is being able to operate on spreadsheet-style data in a contiguous environment, building it into the document in a way that you can’t if there’s a file type divide
Org-mode tables are super convenient for organising information. You just press | and tab and you have a new table in your text file! You can insert lines with |- tab and the columns auto expand to fill your text.
The formula functionality is pretty useful too, although I rarely use it and working it out is a bit of a puzzle still.
I have a bookmarklet in my browser for recommendations. I have org-protocol set up so when I highlight a book title and click the bookmarklet, org mode opens and prompts me for several other things (author, genre, notes, format, etc.) and then it saves all that to a table with the website I found the recommendation. The table allows me to sort different genres and go back to see why I found that title compelling in the first place.
I also use org's ability to show properties as a table. When I read something I write a little review for myself and have some relevant info in the properties drawer. I can toggle a table view to see and sort all the properties.
Not specifically spreadsheets, but the org table code is also used in the feature-mode for writing gherkin tests. One of the powerful aspects of cucumber tests is the tables, and having the org tables code in the editor means that the feature mode didn't have to do anything to support tables that auto size and align and add columns etc.
I use org-mode mainly just for note taking, and I've only been using it for a little over a year. In addition to notes, I do software planning and cost estimating. I prefer this to a "real" spreadsheet application, because they are mostly text, with a few important numbers. Those numbers can still easily be added to computations.
Also, stubbornly, I prefer my comfortable emacs environment to the clicky unfamiliar interface of something like Google Sheets / Excel. Finally, org-export is fairly infinite in potential. I actually sync these notes to GitHub, which displays the org file as Github-Flavored Markdown -> HTML without even needing to export. The tables export very nicely, and are easily consumable in a read-only fashion by those who asked for them.
Imagine having small patches of spreadsheet along your document without the clutter and slowness of a GUI. Also the equation evaluator is a symbolic engine. I manage all my nutrition with it, from macronutrient count to ingredient prices.
They should mention the excellent Orgzly (org mobile app) on the install page. I don't even use org files but it was the best touch GUI for plaintext lists I could find for android.
To anyone who's on the fence about trying Org: if organization has ever been a problem for you, I don't think you'll regret giving it a spin. I considered myself a disorganized person for all my life until I started using Org-mode, but not anymore. It's been such a relief to my overall stress/anxiety.
Slightly off topic: To be honest, the non correct indendation in https://orgmode.org/resources/img/main.svg is the reason why I always change my text editor fonts in a way that for every highlight variant, the same font is used. Different font sizes, font families, etc. have the effect that the monospacing is lost.
This has got to be one of the cleanest websites I have seen in recent times. The layout, spacing between letters and lines and the color contrast are very satisfying to the eyes. I'm sure there are thousands of websites out there with similar layouts but there is something very pleasing about this.
I like it, especially the up-front demo! For a while I've been wanting to learn Org Mode, and this redesign is making it much more clear to me what Org Mode is and how I'd use it.
I love using org mode but what I would really like is a thin GUI client which would keep me from making silly mistakes (such as deleting a heading line accidentally and leaving the orphaned content under a new heading), keep things visually separate, and help organize links between headings and tags.
Also an easier way to customize the agenda command without writing lisp would be more user friendly!
I do use a browser that might not support all the latest things, but I suspect the site could be made a bit more compatible. The layout isn't that advanced.
I have always wanted to learn Org Mode, but at the same time I have been trying to learn emacs (spacemacs) and this has been a bit complex and my interested has fallen quickly.
Any ideas or resources on learning org mode? Can it be used with ex. IntelliJ? Should I learn first plain emacs then orgmode? Or should I look into other note taking tools
I wish there were a comparable mode for neovim. I now use a combination of Google Keep and vimwiki, but I really liked org-mode back when I used emacs.
It's a huge coincidence that I'm beginning to enter into the world of emacs owing to org-mode after being a vi(m) user for about 15 years now. Of course, I'm doing this with evil mode which I'd say gives the best of both worlds. vim's editor keys are much more intuitive and easy on the hands than emacs'.
Hoping to eventually learn more of org-mode and use it more diligently.
I also switched from Vim to Emacs specifically for Org Mode and Magit. I found the Doom Emacs configuration to be a perfect match for my muscle memory. ;)
I document my learnings about the Emacs/Doom ecosystem (including Org Mode, Magit et al) in a form of short videos on YouTube [1]. Maybe it will help in your journey...
[+] [-] siraben|5 years ago|reply
There's also other cool things like a habit tracker[2] that can also show you an interactive mode where you can see your progress.
[0] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro...
[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Tracking-your-habits.html
[+] [-] zenlot|5 years ago|reply
Everytime I see an article about Org, I think how nice it would be to use it and feel comfortable in it, it just never worked out for me.
[+] [-] PrayagS|5 years ago|reply
Came here to say exactly this!
[+] [-] john4532452|5 years ago|reply
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke...
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5j3lc/emacs_key_bin...
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plater|5 years ago|reply
The agenda has several different views to help you prioritize what to work on next based on priorities and scheduled timestamps. You can also sort and filter.
It does not support all the Emacs org mode features, but supports the most common ones. The main focus of EasyOrg is on Todos and I tend to use one org file per project (mainly bigger projects, not the shopping list or to do around the house type of stuff). I used to use a regular text file to keep track of what to do for my projects, but with Org mode and EasyOrg's agenda it's easier to see what needs to be done and prioritize.
It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop. Feedback welcome!
https://www.easyorgmode.com
[+] [-] skeeterbug|5 years ago|reply
http://vimwiki.github.io/
[+] [-] rthomas6|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inferense|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thespoonbends|5 years ago|reply
... there must be a mode that does this already?
[+] [-] JohnL4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nackjicholson|5 years ago|reply
If you're like me, you'll go through these steps.
1. Use org-mode in one file for a few years to track all of your todos. You can make a good David Allen GTD system this way. Headings for Inbox, Projects, Someday/Maybe, Tickler.
2. Discover https://www.orgroam.com/ as the best note taking and personal knowledge system you've ever seen.
3. Obsess about backing up all of your org files because if you ever lose them you will literally have lost half of what you know.
[+] [-] didibus|5 years ago|reply
I guess this is where the original roamresearch.com is hoping to make their money.
[+] [-] obelos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasdack|5 years ago|reply
Do you use version control to backup org-mode, or opt for some Google Drive/Dropbox/Nextcloud scheme?
[+] [-] nunodonato|5 years ago|reply
all my org files are inside an org folder in Dropbox :) instant sync of my org system between computers :)
[+] [-] ancarda|5 years ago|reply
Like, that spreadsheet example seems clunky to me, why would I want to use this?
[+] [-] karlicoss|5 years ago|reply
Spreadsheets.. personally, never had the need to use formulas, but they are very nice when you need.. well, to organize information in tables. For example, I'm using it with org-capture to track sleep data straight into the table, which results in a table row for each day (with an auto-generated timestamp).
[+] [-] taeric|5 years ago|reply
In large, it is Emacs taken to an extreme. With the major feature point that all cards are on the table. Meaning the file you get at the end, is just plain text. There is no need to ever worry about export of data being locked out from you. Yes, using it is currently best exemplified with Emacs. No, nothing is forcing that.
[+] [-] jeromenerf|5 years ago|reply
- teaching classes and grading students - working on a quote / invoice for a customer (I add numeric properties to an org item, org gather them in a table, and I add columns to that to get sums, taxes, discounts, etc) - designing my woodworking and other building stuff, for cutlist and so on
I am not the kind of guy that lives in emacs, I only use it for org mode, in a way that resembles a scientific notebook, mixing text, data and code.
I would not force it onto anyone, but using anything else feels backwards.
[+] [-] Derbasti|5 years ago|reply
So far, this could be easily done in markdown, or even plain text. But then I tally up the points, and convert them to a grade based on some simple equation in a table. My colleagues need to do this in a separate Excel sheet. I can do it right in my org document.
[+] [-] samus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tecosaur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badjeans|5 years ago|reply
The formula functionality is pretty useful too, although I rarely use it and working it out is a bit of a puzzle still.
[+] [-] stinkytaco|5 years ago|reply
I also use org's ability to show properties as a table. When I read something I write a little review for myself and have some relevant info in the properties drawer. I can toggle a table view to see and sort all the properties.
[+] [-] simtel20|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trey-jones|5 years ago|reply
Also, stubbornly, I prefer my comfortable emacs environment to the clicky unfamiliar interface of something like Google Sheets / Excel. Finally, org-export is fairly infinite in potential. I actually sync these notes to GitHub, which displays the org file as Github-Flavored Markdown -> HTML without even needing to export. The tables export very nicely, and are easily consumable in a read-only fashion by those who asked for them.
[+] [-] sasaf5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarbutt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chapium|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anyfoo|5 years ago|reply
Source: I use org-mode for project notes, and they do end up with a lot of tables.
[+] [-] JohnL4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ropeladder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivierestsage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktpsns|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yantrams|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsa25519|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
Also an easier way to customize the agenda command without writing lisp would be more user friendly!
[+] [-] aszen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tecosaur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john-aj|5 years ago|reply
I do use a browser that might not support all the latest things, but I suspect the site could be made a bit more compatible. The layout isn't that advanced.
[+] [-] asdojasdosadsa|5 years ago|reply
Any ideas or resources on learning org mode? Can it be used with ex. IntelliJ? Should I learn first plain emacs then orgmode? Or should I look into other note taking tools
[+] [-] Wonnk13|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thespoonbends|5 years ago|reply
I use it as a personal planner for career and life stuff. Nothing too fancy, just TODOs with tags.
[+] [-] nivenkos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srinathkrishna|5 years ago|reply
Hoping to eventually learn more of org-mode and use it more diligently.
[+] [-] zaiste|5 years ago|reply
I document my learnings about the Emacs/Doom ecosystem (including Org Mode, Magit et al) in a form of short videos on YouTube [1]. Maybe it will help in your journey...
[1]: https://zaiste.net/courses/emacs-doom/
[+] [-] jeromenerf|5 years ago|reply
I think the design language is too simple though, Twitter bootstrap like, which doesn’t convey the rich possibilities offered by org.
Org is more than roam or markdown and it’s not quite clear how for the newcomers. Maybe some nice graphical mindmap-like feature map?