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by solarkraft 2231 days ago
I use Dynalist, but would love to use FOSS for something this important (I dont use Emacs because it's hard on the eyes and seems to lack all drag and drop support).

Does org mode generally support the kind of infinite nesting Dynalist does? Mostly seeing documents with it and the vscode plugin not even coloring after level 5 anymore indicates to me "no".

2 comments

Dynalist is great. I'd use it, but I've been burned enough by "free" plans in the past, and $100 a year is a lot more than I'm willing pay when org-mode is available for free. Plus I have to be online to use Dynalist.

I can't speak for the VS Code plugin, but I'm not aware any limits on depth in Emacs. I can't say I often go more than four deep. If you mean zooming (the killer feature of Dynalist IMO) it's possible in Emacs. You can turn the current subtree into its own org file.

I might try out Org mode at some point on desktop, but I also need something for mobile. I know Orgzly exists, but it seems quite clunky. When I'm in jotting-down mode I can add a bullet point every few seconds and I get the feeling that Org mode just isn't quite designed for that.

> You can turn the current subtree into its own org file.

As in "you can not just zoom in within a file"? That'd be super annoying when wanting to focus on one thing quickly.

Regarding being burned by free plans: I don't know how it works for them economically, but in general they seem like incredibly generous and wonderful people. Full export in a plain text format and OPML are one click in the app/CURL request with the right cookies to dynalist.io/backup away. They're quite responsive and nice on Twitter. When the service was down for a few hours pretty exactly a year ago (that means no sync, but the desktop app still works with local data) they gave everyone 2 weeks of premium as an apology (the main benefits are inline pictures and a sideways tree view, so it's not that appealing).

Maybe they'll make me pay at some point and I think it's worth about 5€ per month to me, beyond that it'd get me uncomfortable considering how polished, but fundamentally simple the service is. If there was such a plan I'd actually get it just to support them, since the service is quite amazing.

Long-term I'd like to have a FOSS app that can do more complex graphs than just trees, with different views and such (imagine a relational-type list of things that you can categorize by different attributes), but Dynalist is by far the best thing I have seen so far.

I fear Org mode just quite doesn't fit my use case, as I think it also doesn't save whether a node is collapsed or not.

I use Orgzly on Android, and would also love to have something similar on the desktop. I'm not l33t enough to use emacs for org-mode.