[asdojasdosadsa]

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

[WnZ39p0Dgydaz1]

About a year ago bit the bullet and learned emacs, mostly for org-mode because of all great reviews. I made it my primary editor for about 6 months, which forced me to become familiar with it.

Now I've dropped it and I'm back to vscode and Roam as my life management system. Maybe the time I gave it was too short, but I didn't feel like org-mode or emacs made me more productive - the opposite. I spent so much time fiddling with configuration options, trying to understand elisp, finding the right emacs/org-mode packages, and so on. Yeah, these things felt productive, but in the end they were are a waste of time that got in the way of getting work done. Also, let's not talk about the time where emacs just crashed and lost several hours of work. Apparently the default config (I used Doom) didn't think it was important to handle that case.

Perhaps things are different once you've use Emacs for 5+ years and are intimately with its ecosystem and packages. So, if you decide to go that route, it's a long-term investment. Don't expect any productivity gains soon.

And honestly, even after using org-mode for 6 months for pretty much everything in my life, I didn't think it was that great. Yeah, it's pretty good, but I don't think it quite lives up to the religious hype it gets from some users. People are going to downvote me for saying this, but IMO org-mode is a pretty neat but outdated piece of technology with most of its following coming from people who grew up with it and have used it for 10+ years. The power comes from their familiarity with it, not from org-mode itself. It's not that great.

[edanm]

What is Roam? I see someone else in this thread mentioned org-roam, but that seems tied to Emacs?

[WnZ39p0Dgydaz1]

Roam is Roam Research [0] which is a paid web-based product. It's relatively new. There are also some open source alternatives like Obsidian.

Because of it's popularity someone created an org-mode package called org-roam [1] that does some of the things that roam does, but in emacs. These are not officially related though.

[0] http://roamresearch.com/

[1] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

[circularfoyers]

I was interested when you mentioned Obsidian was open source, thinking they must of changed that since the last I read about it. But I looked it up again and it's not, it's still proprietary.

[edanm]

Oh ok, and it can be used with VSCode somehow? Or were you talking about unrelated things?

[WnZ39p0Dgydaz1]

Those are unrelated, Roam is just a web-based SaaS app.

[mickael-kerjean]

I made a tutorial series on emacs and org mode: https://mickael.kerjean.me/2017/03/20/emacs-tutorial-series-...

[jeromenerf]

What makes orgmode great is currently emacs only:

- Babel, for literate programming, similar to notebooks, which is to me the most important feature - agenda - all the key bindings helpers to insert / set / move things around

Most of the basic features are available with any editor, markdown and pandoc.

- text files, so git-able - lightweight markup - export to anything

I have been using emacs for org mode only, for a decade or so. Org mode is a lot more than a note taking app.

I would recommend using doom as a starting point for vim users willing to try org, as it sets good defaults to get right into the good stuff.

[dfinninger]

I’ve been on-again, off-again with Emacs and Org over the past 10 years. The best advice I can give is to not get in over your head.

Emacs and Org are the best combo for me because of the near infinite flexibility they provide... but that power, if tapped too early, will cause you to spiral into configuration hell and burn you out.

There’s also the temptation to look at other configs and copy stuff into yours. But I’ve found that most people have configured Emacs/Org to match their brainwaves. What I end up with after copy-pasting my way through a config is a Frankenstein’s monster. It doesn’t feel right.

So, I’d advise patience. First step is to learn some basic Emacs like file editing (I used Evil-mode from the start to make this easy). Maybe setup auto save of files if that’s important. And get familiar with Org syntax. There are IntelliJ/VSCode plugins that do highlighting if you want to practice in a familiar environment.

After that, practice what you can do with Tab and Ctrl-c (C-c). There are a surprising number of features with these two keys. Hide/expand, header tagging, table reformatting, etc.

I stopped here for years and found it very useful.

Learning Elisp (beyond basic configuration), the agenda, roam/deft, capture templates, table formulas, Babel, export, etc. will come as you need them afterwards.

[tossAfterUsing]

I'm in a similar boat. Except I started with emacs so i could learn org-mode. i dropped spacemacs and went to Doom (which i greatly prefer).

In Doom, i get to org-mode with SPC-X. it's great. it's helping me learn emacs, too.