[ilovecaching]

I feel like org mode has almost become a joke it’s so oversold as the answer to all of life’s note taking problems. Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices. And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book and start presenting something they made in emacs…

I think we all know using difficult tools tickles our programmer brains, but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?

[comfypotato]

You made a big jump from note taking to presenting something from a pine book. (And I’m upset by your comment because it’s ignorant.) The article’s author is much further down the rabbit hole than most.

People don’t use org mode because it tickles their brain; I don’t at least. I use it, just to take notes and manage tasks, because nothing else worked. I didn’t start using org mode planning to be a devotee. It was just another iteration of trying a note-taking and time management solution. Noteable other failed approaches include Todoist, an old school paper agenda and notebooks, or an attempt at using the iPhone’s built-in reminders and notes. Finally I’ve stuck with something. It’s a testament to how good org is that it delivered enough value while I was still picking up Emacs (for the purpose of using org) that I stuck with it.

Contrary to your point about org mode getting negative comments from management, my notes and scheduling in an org doc have gotten praise from my managers during Zoom screen shares. It probably only evokes comments because it’s different (as opposed to particularly impressive) but they are definitely positive comments.

[ithrow]

What didn't work for you with Todoist? I'm using along side orgmode to quickly write down tasks on my phone.

[comfypotato]

Todoist was too much of its own ecosystem. (I use reminders for mobile task generation because Im comfortable in Apple’s ecosystem.) I wasn’t willing to learn the Todoist ecosystem with the risk of them changing it on a whim. (I’m also elisp-savvy so I can hack org mode to do exactly what I want, but that’s not the real issue/selling point.)

It’s mostly not wanting to learn Todoist. I’d rather learn org mode knowing it’s mature. It drives me nuts when corps change the tools I use. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, you know? The risk of having a workflow-breaking change at an annoying time stresses me too much. Org mode changes at a much slower pace, and it’s much easier to use an older version of org while I adapt to the changes.

There’s definitely nothing I do in org that can’t be done in Todoist. So theoretically Todoist would actually be better right now because of the mobile integration. I really like knowing that there’s a lot of room to grow with org mode, though. The workflow I aspire to is much more possible with org mode in the long run.

[mtts]

You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools.

This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use.

Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs.

This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

[HelloNurse]

I'd rather say that phones aren't a good tool for Org-mode: they are very challenged at text input (no keys) and interfaces that avoid text with buttons, dragging, and other reliable gestures have the advantage of minimizing the text and quasi-text input that is the backbone of Org-mode and Emacs in general.

[ubermonkey]

That's a long way of saying that you don't think of phones as a legitimate use case, but the rest of the world mostly disagrees with you.

I've got ten years of orgmode buffers and I'm actively working to transition to Obsidian because the mobile story is so much better. With plugins like tasks, dataview, and outliner, I can do pretty much anything in Obsidian I could do in Org, and I can do it on my iPad without having to SSH to my Linode instance first.

that's powerful.

[ithrow]

How does the outliner obsidian plugin compares to orgmode? My biggest use case for orgmode is as an outliner for projects and the features you can use while outlining like dates, deadlines, schedules, todos, lists, progress indicators for lists and todos, agenda view, notes in outlines headings etc... also how easy is to move outlines around with the keyboard, how you can focus one outline into a new buffer, it's pretty convenient.

[ubermonkey]

It works pretty well for my use case, but its behavior is different in a significant way that I'm hoping will be corrected by an option or by a more org-mode-minded alternative.

In Org, we can do things like this:

  * Outline element
    text under this element
  ** Child of outline element
      some text that belongs to the child element

etc.

The outliner plugin for Obsidian is "outline only," if you take my meaning, so there's no provision for non-outline text in the outline.

[ithrow]

Thanks and yeah, being able to put text under the outline is like the most important feature for me and it's where most outliners fall short.

[EFreethought]

If you are an Emacs user, saying the rest of the world is wrong is pretty easy.

[ParetoOptimal]

> but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

Speaking from an android perspective:

Best is organice (but requires local android webdav server if you don't want to connect to github) for most people design-wise I think.

Others will prefer orgzly.

> This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

emacs is available on fdroid now and using a bluetooth keyboard it's a good experience. I hope to improve the touch experience, for instance I recently released a library to make clocking in/out on mobile or just by mouse easier:

https://github.com/ParetoOptimalDev/org-inline-clocking-butt...

I intend to try and make org-mode usable by touch in emacs on android eventually, but it'll be slow and according to things I really need as I need them.

[hoosieree]

Org is not perfect by any means. It crashes occasionally and is sometimes laggy.

I think it's fair to say that for the task of markup only, Markdown is lighter weight and it makes sense that it's implemented (slightly differently) nearly everywhere.

On the other hand, org-mode replaces Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things. This is why I keep using org-mode - not because it's better at markup, but because it's "good enough" at markup, and simultaneously "good enough" at many other things.

[zelphirkalt]

I mostly use org-mode on a computer, with a screen and a keyboard. Markdown uses fewer characters for some things like code blocks (source blocks in org-mode), that is true. That said, not only does org replace Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things, it also has markup capabilities, which are simply lacking in Markdown (common mark if you want). For example checklists. Or citation. Or datetimes. Or spreadsheets. Or inclusion of other documents/files at a specifiable heading level. Or tagging of headings. Or marking headings "TODO", "DONE" and similar.

Many things in org-mode are modifiable. For example the "status" of a heading like "TODO", "DONE" and so on. You can add new words in document wide properties at the top of an org file.

I know there are markdown dialects, that partially cover this or that feature, but none to cover all that org provides out of the box.

The org format is much more suitable for any technical or scientific or academic document, that has any slightly raised requirements. In Markdown one often finds oneself using workarounds to make something look nice in the rendered output. Similar to how restructuredtext is powerful and can be used for academic paper writing and all that. Markdown is merely the lowest common denominator, too minimalistic for my taste. Good for a chat or messenger, but not really for good technical documents.

I still have to see a tool for writing markdown, that works as nicely as tooling for org-mode in Emacs, with all the things like changing heading levels for 1 heading or a whole subtree and export buffer or subtree, or cut visible or subtree, widen, narrow, folding, and all those nice things.

[VyseofArcadia]

> the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices.

Isn't it incredible that we've lost the ability, as a culture, to be on top of things without our pocket supercomputers?

I don't need org mode on my phone. I dont need it on every device I own. I use org mode on my PC, and if I need any form of portability I can jot stuff down on a little piece of paper.

Also, it's just text. We have countless services that can synchronize plain text files. Stop being whiney and pick one.

> And I’m sure managers love it when their employees need to give a presentation and they pull out the old trusty pine book

Stop being so snotty.

> and start presenting something they made in emacs…

Yeah, I love an editor talk actually. Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

[comfypotato]

I’d never heard it put that way, that presenting in an editor is a strong no-bullshit signal, but how true is this!

I had a professor who would teach from Emacs. She would store each section of the lecture in a register and paste as she went. (Watching her cursor flit around the buffer was actually strong encouragement for me to learn Emacs; it was nice to see how deftly it could be done without interrupting the flow of the lecture.)

She had slides too, but obviously being in Emacs for these portions allowed interactive displays of code execution.

[abeppu]

> Presenting with an editor is a strong signal that a meeting is low-bullshit.

I think there are two kinds of bullshit relevant to meetings. One is spin or dishonesty, and the other is wasting people's time. Presenting with an editor can mean that what's about to be presented is honest and straight-forward, being grounded in the actual matter being discussed. Or it can mean that an engineer did zero prep for the meeting.

[ithrow]

Here is Rich Hickey doing a conference talk in orgmode ;) https://youtu.be/thpzXjmYyGk?t=376

[eviks]

> I don't need org mode on my phone. ... little piece of paper.

And then type that back on a computer? No, thanks, no desktop-oriented note format is ever worth going back that deep into the caves

[seanw444]

Do you really have that long of notes that summarizing your handwritten note into a couple sentences max, and serializing it into org-mode is such a travesty?

It really seems like people hate org-mode just to hate it, because they've heard so much praise that there needs to be some sort of counter-culture. Even if it doesn't actually make sense.

[ubermonkey]

People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

They are noting a serious gap in its capabilities. I say this as a long-term org user, too -- I've tried to mobile tools, and they don't work for me.

Org is great if you live in emacs and have no need or desire to access that corpus of data when you're not sitting at a computer. But in 2023, that's a pretty serious drawback, and pretending it isn't is a weird look.

[VyseofArcadia]

> People who want to enjoy a synced, always-there corpus of notes are not "hating" Orgmode because it can't do that.

Org-mode files are text files. Anything that can sync text files will happily sync them. Anything that can edit text files can happily edit them. Sure, emacs is the best way to work with org files, but nothing is stopping you from syncing it with whatever you want (I use Nextcloud) and editing it with whatever you want.

I feel like this is such a key feature of org mode that people are missing. It isn't magic. It's just text, with a buttload of convenience functions that happen to be written in elisp.

[ubermonkey]

...and to which you have no access in a non-emacs environment, which is why "it's text! just sync and open in whatever!" isn't a good mobile answer.

The inability to fold headings alone is a dealkiller, and enough reason to look for something else. Which is why Obsidian is so interesting to a lot of folks who use orgmode but are not attached to emacs at a religious level.

[seanw444]

Yeah, I suppose if someone really needs that capability, then Org (at least currently) isn't the markup for them.

I mostly referring to the "why do people keep bringing it up - it's such a joke" aspect. Well, it's obviously because lots of people find it awesome and more than adequate.

[eviks]

I don't have long notes precisely because I haven't ignored progress and try to use a pocket computer. Also, what's your theory of communication that explains why people casually dismiss serious flaws and switch the discussion to people and culture?

[throwanem]

Back in 2017 I presented a new internal product to some VPs, most of whom I'd never met before, from org-mode source with slides via org-reveal. That remains one of the two or three most highly lauded presentations I've yet given, in a career now heading toward its 25th year.

Org is easier to use and more capable now than it was then, and so is the tooling around it. That includes mobile; most, maybe all, of the apps linked from the article didn't exist back then, and there are several others not mentioned there. The community's grown significantly, too.

So I'm not sure what point you think you're making here, but what I'm hearing is that you don't feel the need to have any familiarity with a technology before offhandedly dismissing it as meme nonsense apparently on the strength of a lot of people trying it and finding it good enough to be worth talking about. I wouldn't be comfortable with making such a showing of myself, but tastes differ, I suppose.

[aeonik]

It's still in beta, but Logseq supports org-mode formatted notes and runs on mobile platforms. I just sync it to my computers. You can do it yourself, but they also offer a service.

Giving presentations from org mode is sweet, because you can execute any code or examples right from the slides. Management doesn't need to know what the underlying tech is.

Having a Google Docs like platform would be very cool though. I'm surprised there isn't a secure P2P framework that can do this in a browser yet.

Overleaf for Latex is cool, but something that could operate on any plain text file like Markdown, org-mode, or Yaml seems like a cool idea: I suppose VSCode kinda supports this idea at the moment with extensions and remote sessions.

[uludag]

Just the thought of having some product manager trying to determine how a productivity app I use fits into their business objectives is reason enough to use something like org-mode. If there is a joke, I think it would be all the churn that "conventional" productivity apps have gone through. I used Evernote before switching to org-mode. The Evernote interface is completely unrecognizable and many vital features have been taken away. Not only that, I'm sure that in a few years it will change even more. Bear may have a more user-friendly product direction but they're still a business trying to make profit. Will the Bear service work in 10 years? Maybe. Will I be able to find a synchronization solution for my org-files? almost certainly.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Never heard of Bear before, but it looks fundamentally unusable to me: limited platform support, possibly requiring serverside storage, charging for encryption, so if you're a free user don't expect notes to be private. I honestly find the concept of charging for note-taking software offensive. It's simple text, storage space is not a meaningful concern, serverside storage is fundamentally unnecessary and a security/privacy concern.

This in my mind is just sloppy, overcomplicated, rent-seeking crap. It fails to meet even a single of the fairly rudimentary features i need for note-taking. Even a terrible text editor like nano would be more useful.

[ithrow]

Yeah just checked Bear out, it can't even fold headlines.

[xenodium]

> Never mind it’s not at all optimized for the most common device - the phone, or has any concept of cloud backed synchronization between devices

https://plainorg.com author here. Got plenty of happy iOS users doing those things.

[adityaathalye]

Thanks for making plainorg! I had listed it in my (hopefully incomplete) list of org-compatible tools in the post :)

cf. the section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/i...

[xenodium]

Thank you! =)

[nvarsj]

I guess the main advantage of org is Emacs itself - it's infinitely customizable and you can quickly hack automation and workflows. That doesn't exist in anything else as far as I know.

If you just want to get stuff done, then something like Obsidian/Bear is really good. I actually swapped from many years of org-mode/roam to Obsidian myself about 6 months ago. My main reason was mobile integration like you mention. Obsidian sync is actually magic for me, a bit like Dropbox was for files.

[radiator]

I am not a user of orgmode, but: Managers would not have an opinion on the technical tools used for a presentation but would rather focus on important things, like clarity of message, tempo etc. But even if they do have an opinion, who cares?

[BeetleB]

Funny, I've authored probably half of my presentations at work since around 2016 using Org. Either export to Beamer or use org-reveal. No one cares.

Of course, Powerpoint is superior in some ways, so I still use it. And if the manager needs a document he can make changes to, then I'll use Powerpoint. But these are exceptions, not the rule.

> but you have to ask yourself, is this really better than using Bear etc. in 2023 for 99% of your note taking needs?

Only works on Apple? A non-starter for me. I type way better on a keyboard on my Linux machine, so any note taking app needs to work on it. And Org mode has been around for 20 years. I have notes I wrote almost 15 years ago in it. I want some guarantee that whatever tool I use will work 20 years from now.

As a general rule, if you have to pay for a niche tool to use it, do not expect it to last two decades.

[mcshicks]

Will I still be able to use Bear in 2033? I'm pretty sure I will still be able to use org mode and emacs. I agree org mode is not very good for collaboration but for that I think really things like Google keep and Google docs are much easier. I liked Wunderlist for that but alas it's gone.

[CmdrLoskene]

Wunderlist lives on, rebranded as Microsoft ToDo. As far as I can tell it's the exact same product, same feature set, etc. I think they made the transition unnecessarily clunky, but it's all there.

[mcshicks]

They closed the API's I used to sync with org mode.

[CmdrLoskene]

That does suck.

[rchaud]

This comment reminds me of the negative reaction on the Nokia story a few days ago where they announced they'd be making phones with replaceable parts.

"Who even needs a phone that doesn't have top-of-the-line imaging sensors! Are you going to take your engagement photos on that?"

Completely missing the point.

[whalesalad]

At the end of the day it’s just text. Not that different from markdown.

[matrix12]

All code is just text...

[comfypotato]

Big org-enthusiast here, but need to defend markdown. Plenty of folks have workflows that allow for inline execution in markdown. Babel is WAY more powerful, but markdown is fine for most code snippets.

[matrix12]

Markdown does not have the same overlap with org-mode. Many use it more like a Jupyter notebook. External work flows would not be considered part of Markdown per se.

#+call: something(foo=bar, list=baz[,0]) this level of features just does not exist in Markdown.

Just not what it was designed for.

[comfypotato]

It just depends on what you’re trying to do. That could easily be done with Python and your favorite pip packages in a markdown code block, including the export (and importing a list of servers from another named markdown block).

The benefits of org and babel are precisely that you can do it in whatever language you’ve written the rest of your literate programming document.

As with most of these spectrums, markdown is less powerful and less complicated. Babel is one of the more confusing parts of org mode.

[paledot]

I've never seen that done in CSS either. Why? Because that's not what CSS is for.

[matrix12]

Well put. Markdown was not designed for the sorts of things Org-mode excels at.

[PurpleRamen]

That example is part of the tooling, not the format. One can do the same with markdown, just write the tool for it. Obsidian.md, a popular markdown-environment for example, has many extensions doing stuff like this. Similar has VS Code.

[JoeyBananas]

There is a way to make slide decks using org mode and they actually look pretty professional. Go watch any David Wilson stream on YouTube.

[sokoloff]

"System Crafters" is the Youtube channel referenced: https://www.youtube.com/c/systemcrafters/playlists

[mik1998]

Emacs for Android! It's a thing.