[e3bc54b2]

1. Embedding of images is pretty much file linking. It can display and let you intract with images inline, but that may not be up to your requirement.

2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin.

3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode.

4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal markdown-like syntax. If you are asking for rich text mixing two different fonts, then no.

5. Yes! Since everything is stored in text files, you can syc them via any means you deem fit. I personally have multiple Syncthing nodes (desktop, laptop and phones) and it works flawlessly.

>it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria

You are right. Perhaps better description would be org-mode is the worst note-taking tool, except all others.

Why I would deem it best is because after decade of experimenting, I've cone to realise that plaintext is the king. Rich editors with inline images, media and fancy fonts are nice and necessary when you're preparing presentations or impressing someone, but when time comes to actual utility when talking about years upon years of notes and other documents, everything else falls short very quickly.

Images and videos cannot be grepped, searching through formatted documents like Word where search program has rk ignore all the formatting is inherently slow and ultimately inaccurate. Compressing and encrypting and sharing plaintext is a breeze. Plaintext can be read thoroughly or skimmed through as needed. While writing plaintext, I don't have to worry about messing up formatting of whole document by entering right character at wrong place and then fiddling about it for hours.

Rich text is nice for when your notes are small. They are nice to feel. But when you are rummaging about a mountain (which everyone eventually builds up if they document anything seriously), nothing matches sheer speed and utility of plaintext.

Which leaves either dumb text or markdown. Markdown is nice, but org-mode is markdown in steroids. Even the simple act of being able to collapse sections with single key is a huge huge QoL improvement. Then there or org-babel for inline programming like Jupyter, org-roam for back links, org-ref for bibliography, pdf-tools with org roam for inline PDF annotation, and you can still grep everything mentioned here.

Ultimately the purpose of notes (for me, goes without saying) is to preserve and eventually refer to, information. And plaintext, in my personal anecdotal opinion and experience, beats every other medium for storing, transferring, modifying and analyzing information.

[kzrdude]

How do you organize suites of notes in org-mode? Do you keep very big documents or one file per project or current task, or how is it divided? And is it possible to have links and hierarchies?

I'm still shopping for a good vim-based note taking solution.

[tomjen3]

Having used it extensively, you can setup org-mode however you want: a file per month, a file per thought, a file per project and everything in between.

It is also the only note taking system I have seen that will let you link to an email. If you want to add a todo entry deep in some meeting notes reminding you to checkup on that email in 3 weeks, you can. And those todos will then show up in your agenda view.

Unfortunately this doesn't work if you don't already use Emacs as your email client, which I guess you don't if you aren't also using org-mode.

[e3bc54b2]

Like the sibling comment said, org-deft is pretty fantastic. I have a single folder with many many org files. I have tags in them for general attributes and link/backlink via org-roam so I can instantly get a bird's eye view of which notes relate to which.

While actually editing, org-roam has simple double-bracket syntax that auto-completes existing filenames. If filename doesn't exist, it is created when the link is accessed first time automatically.

Hierarchy gets established automatically as I track back links, or via org-roam graph view. But really, once I started linking notes extensively (because its so easy with org-roam), I realised that my structure ended up mostly as a graph rather than tree. However, org-mode itself has excellent tree style syntax within individual file, which comes in handy.

Searching/analyzing can be done either from withing Emacs via elisp or externally via ripgrep/fd (I'm still noon at elisp)/

[ynniv]

I use deft. A hot key brings up the list, then typing narrows the list based on name or content.

https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/

[sjy]

What’s the experience of searching and editing your org-mode notes on your (presumably Android, since Syncthing doesn’t exist on iOS) phone like? I’ve been interested in org-mode for a while, but most advocates seem to spend all their time in front of a keyboard.

[e3bc54b2]

After using org-mode since beginning of pandemic, I've realised that I do little to no editing on my phone.

But for that little editing, Orgzly all from f-droid is pretty great. As a side bonus, it handles TODOs from my org-agenda to generate Android notifications! Very handy and very private.

I'm not sure of Syncthing story on iOS as I don't have an apple device, but you can always store your notes on dropbox/icloud/whathaveyou. Unfortunately I lack any experience to be helpful with Apple devices otherwise.

[billyjobob]

Not sure how useful it is given Apple’s restrictions, but it does exist: https://www.mobiussync.com/

[yokoprime]

Möbius Sync is an implementation of SyncThing for iOS

[scpedicini]

I understand what you're saying wrt to rtf versus text but I completely disagree and I say this as somebody who used to have all of my notes in thousands of plain text files.

I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts.

For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily.

I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.

When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.

Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.

I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience.

Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad.

I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different.

You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat.

[e3bc54b2]

> I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.

org-babel allows this, with added ability to (optionally) execute and see and interact with output inline.

> Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.

Fully supported via org-roam, with added bonus of backlinks.

> When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.

This is a pretty nifty workflow, and I admit a useful one. I am not sure if gifs can be viewed inline withing Emacs, but so far I haven't seen nor tried, so this is a definite shortcoming.

> Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use,

Emacs is absolute horrific experience here. It is a terrible match for anyone looking to setup and start in under 5 minutes, especially because it is wildly different from anything you might have come across.

> You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it

Evernote, way when I used it was still pretty cool. It allowed saving whole webpages directly, and linking them inside notes. But for a broke student from not-so-rich country, its free tier of 60MB ran out very very quickly. Paid tiers were prohibively expensive as $1 meant a day's sustenance or more. I also had a crappy laptop and Evernote wasn't the fastest thing around. It also forced me to think in terms of Notebooks and hierarchy. The notes and notebooks are also not so easily greppable. The UI of Evernote, its biggest strength during on boarding, became crippling for me. As for why kicked it for me in the end is, as you mentioned, single commerical entity ultimately controlling my collected knowledge and its structure. I am personally not comfortable putting thousands of hours of work so someone else can control it. I also write my journal in org-mode, with detailed analysis of social interactions (I'm not good at people, if its not clear by now :)) and I don't want anybody but me taking a peek.

Fortunately, Evernote works for you! And thanks to detailed requirements, someone might refer this conversation in future and make an informed decision based on it, as I once did :)