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.
The ability to just freely type in a table and it keeps it aligned automatically with basically ASCII art, and allows me to sort or rearrange lines or columns, is just fantastic.
If I really need a "spreadsheet", I will use a dedicated software package (which is sometimes actually Matlab, because often that's what I actually need, except for finance stuff), but so so many times when jotting down notes I just need some hassle-free instant tables.
Let me guess: because it is proprietary, has a terrible license management experience and there is an open source alternative: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
Most "scientific" languages have indexes starting in 1 and/or configurable (R, Julia, Fortran, APL). In some applications (finite element methods), it makes sense for indexes to start at negative numbers.
Indexes starting at 1 is good. Offsets starting at 0 is good. Confusing offsets for indexes leads to off-by-one errors. C's "array" notation is taught as being an index, when it's actually an offset.
The tables / spreadsheet functionality can be super helpful when you just need to jot down thoughts which lead to comparisons which lead to calculations which lead to helping you decide which path you want to go down. It's really great to not have to leave the context of what I'm doing and just open up an org mode buffer and jot down my thoughts and then come out with an answer that is backed by calculations I'm confident in. Very handy 'back of the envelope' or 'napkin' alternative!
Yes, there's a great blog post that describes how this functionality is really helpful to manage your life as lots of little spreadsheets [1].
For me that's the true advantage of Org over Markdown. It has timestamps, spreadsheets and links with citations (e.g. a DOI link type). Plus the ability to get programmatic document views using org-agenda. I can manage my whole life in a really minimal and uncomplicated way.
Of course, you can develop a really fancy Org setup. But I think a minimal one, with these features and defaults is really good enough. Plus, not hard to learn.
I love spreadsheeting in org-mode. It's been very useful at work for sharing complex processes with QA and other devs. With org-babel and SQL I can extract DB data into org tables, manipulate them like a spreadsheet and then do additional things with the result.
Honestly I learned it for my own edification, but it turns out literate programming IS useful in the real world. Sometimes.
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!
Those people are complaining that they don't want to learn a new complex UI (what it is - I have wondered in the past if it wouldn't be better for me to simply disable org-mode and edit the files as plain text). Getting using to the undo is part of 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.
Thank you! Org mode has made me try to switch to Emacs for a while, but somehow have never been able to change my workflow, and Emacs is just to bloated to just start up for jotting a simple note... (I've found myself editing .org files in vim, which is just ridiculous!)
Maybe this will solve my conundrum!
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 meant modal as in "if you hold down backspace, the item's text will be removed, but the item heading will remain", i.e. the headers are read-only while editing an item. evil-org-mode won't stop me pressing backspace too many times and screwing up.
You could use hydra [1] to set up something like this pretty easily. I did have a setup like this once, but found that escaping the 'modes' with an extra keypress when I only typically wanted to do one or two operations wasn't particularly nice.
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 also why I won't use them, because I see my notes as a decades-long project, and I have no guarantee they'll be there for long.
Plus I avoid anything that's associated with the word cult, and they quite literally refer to their community as a RoamCult. (The title of forum.roamresearch.com is "Roam Research - Home of RoamCult".)
It was mostly a joke meant to play off the idea that avoiding a cult because it's something like superstitious is itself a superstitious action.
But since the joke didn't go over and I'm in explainer mode anyway, the kernel of truth in the joke is simply that the word cult here is obviously a tongue in cheek reference to how excited the early adopters are about the tech, and acting like it's evidence of some deeper shadiness is probably assigning more meaning to the word/phenomenon than it deserves. And changing one's behavior as though the meaning they imagine is real, well... there's a word for that ;)
Having checked out both Roam Reserach and org-roam, I'm still surprised by the existence of the former.
The core idea is literally bolting backlinks on top of Workflowy. How is it you can make a business out of that? How is it that the idea is only now reaching viral popularity, even though its a rather obvious concept that had various well-known incarnations in the past (e.g. automated "pingbacks" on blogs in the 2000s), was fully conceptualized into an even better idea all the way back in the 1970s (Xanadu's transclusions), and probably traces its lineage all the way to ancient Sumeria. I sometimes don't understand the lifecycle of ideas and tools in our reality.
(That's not a jab at Roam Research folks. I congratulate them on building a successful piece of software. Though I'm not going to use it anyway, because I like to own my data.)
I think if you look at the landing page of Roam Research and org-roam you already know why the first one is popular with regular people and not the latter one.
I'm not surprised org-roam isn't going viral (and actually it is, within the population of org mode users!). I'm surprised you can make a startup out of a single, simple idea that is automatically tracking backlinks.
To borrow a phrase from discussions around Dropbox, this most definitely is a feature, not a product.
It's definitely just a feature - but a very liberating one. Not having to worry so much about how you organize your files and where to put stuff is such a relief.
But I think it's too early to call roam, the startup, a success. It has some mindshare, but the product has no defensibility. It's not that complex. A competent developer can probably build a clone of Roam in 1-2 months of full-time work. A lot of copycats have started already and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years it's not Roam that has won but just another copycat that had a better UI. Kind of reminds of how Slack killed that other app before it... was it... hipchat?
I tried it and loved it but the pricing model and fact that it is hosted made me stop using it. I have nothing against either choice, they are just not right for me.
The takeout option lets you download a copy of your files at any time but they also often have sync issues, etc. As far as I can tell, they make heavy use of local browser storage which syncs to a cloud back up. People keep seeing data loss (or did when I stopped following them) when this connection fails. Is it growing pains? Yes, probably. Is it right for me when this risk can lead to data loss and not just a conflict resolution process? No.
I do wish them luck and am looking forward to the various local clones getting better (org-roam, Obsidian, etc... no shortage).
I've been using it daily for a few months and haven't had a single issue. Perhaps the server load also went down when they introduced the pricing. I do download my data every few days or so just in case.
Personally I'm not a fan of the company, culture, and the cult-like following Roam has. I hope somebody else succeeds and takes over the market and I'll move there. But so far roam is the best life/knowledge management app I've used, and I've tried a lot of them.
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.
Although git works great, there is some double-duty regarding history: there are both the git history of the .org files and also the.org_archive files. I wonder if people opt for one or the other and not both?
I've been using Org Mode for close to 10 years now, and I never grokked how the archiving is supposed to be used. You can browse the archive files for your data, and the automatically added metadata give some context as to where it was located, but AFAIK you can't rebuild an old version of an .org file from the archive. So because of that, if I care about the whole structural history of an org file, I stick it in a git repository.
True! I don't worry much about backup, I do a copy once in a while of the whole folder to a different place. But those who care can automate that easily with a script and cron. When it's just plain text files, everything becomes easier :)
I used to have my files stored on iCloud while it was only my Windows Desktop and my iPad but when I threw my Android phone in the mix I switched to Dropbox.
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).
> 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'm curious how one would do that. Would you mind sharing your capture template?
You can keep it all in one file, along with the code and results of its execution.
That org capture template will feed new data into a table; below it, in the same .org file, you can keep your R code and your Python code and whatever other code you prototype (I often write Elisp code), and you can execute all that code inside the .org file.
This approach is not giving you any new features, it's just optimizing for convenience. Think of .org files as Jupyter notebooks on steroids :).
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.
That is correct and it is a pity other editors are so far behind in all things org. It means that for people, who have not tried it and gotten used to it, there is a double obstacle to take and most will miss out on it for that reason.
- 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
To add on this - you can use it as inputs (and outputs) for org babel. Eg. A tabulated list of ENV vars to be passed to a bash script, which in turn generates a list of URLs that you can pass to a RESTclient script or python.
When editing, it updates the width of columns automatically and supports tabbing through, along with re-arranging rows using common shortcuts within org mode.
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.
I do too. The dev has mentioned that he wanted to make a web app, but that's yet to happen. I did however try launching it in Anbox today and it seems to run perfectly, so that's an option.
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.
That's an argument for having some personal organisation system, not necessarily for org-mode. After multiple attempts of using Emacs and a couple of tries at org-mode I just decided that the time investment that I need to put in a frustrating to learn interface just isn't worth it.
I take your point, but in fact my argument is for Org, specifically. I've tried tons of options, from things like Evernote to very different approaches like GTD with an all-physical tickler file. I also picked up and dropped Org/Emacs a couple of times before they really "clicked" - but once they did, they clicked for good.
Obviously no system is going to be the objectively superior choice for everyone, but I think there's a very strong case to be made for Org for anyone who (a) finds the plain-text approach to this problem appealing and (b) wants agenda/calendaring functionality built right on top of the other organizational functions.
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!
If you haven't already, you might want to add (setq org-catch-invisible-edits 'smart) to your config. It will stop you from backspacing over anything invisible, but I don't think it stops the issue of highlighting a region and deleting it.
This was a problem I ran into early on while using Org, but a combination of this setting and Git helped solve it.
You can find syntax highlighting + a bit more in a number of editors (see the bottom of the install page), but unfortunately much of the "really cool" stuff is currently only available with Emacs.
You don’t have to switch. You can use it as a dedicated application, like you would use your browser, spreadsheet program or notebook. I guess it’s easier if your preferred editor is vim, as emacs vim support is great.
Syntax is not at all, but you lose all the benefits of doing org-mode. If you're not in a situation to afford the switch, do not switch. This is not for you.
I've noticed a few relatively minor issues, which can be rephrased/viewed as "why" questions:
- The introductory text ("Org mode is for keeping notes [...]") overflows, possibly because of an enforced minimum font size (and an assumption about it that doesn't always hold true in the markup) in my case.
- SVG images are embedded as objects, leading to noscript blocking them in FF, and just unnecessary spam ("Sorry, your browser does not support SVG.") in lynx. This one is more of a question, rather than just a report: why not to use the img tag (which, I think, is handled generally better) instead? Or even to leave them as texts.
- "Made with by TEC" uses a relatively uncommon glyph (the font I use doesn't have that; apparently it was assigned just last year).
> I expect "Org mode is for keeping notes [...]" to take up about three lines. What's going wrong for you?
It takes 4 lines here, but the issue is with horizontal overflow: "planning" is in the end of the first line for me, and it's cut on the last "n" (with no horizontal scroll). Below that, "developed by many others." is cut on "h" in "others". That's in FF 68, where it's also aligned to the right side, while in FF 78 it is centered. All the other elements are centered in FF 68 too.
It moves to the left and becomes readable (i.e., all words are fully visible) when I remove font settings (org.css:32) and the --body-left ones, or if "display: flex" is disabled altogether, but not sure what's the exact issue. There's "overflow-x: hidden" in the CSS, which probably contributes to it.
Edit: apparently it's similar to the issue reported by john-aj here.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I've been using org mode since 2015 and for a majority of that time I didn't really customize anything besides some more TODO labels. I've changed my layout several times too as I've changed projects or roles. Since it's just text I'd just start with using headings+folding and todos. Even just that is better than a text file. You can pick up more things as you find some friction in your organization process and wonder if there's a different way to do something. I eventually found that tags didn't work much for me but properties were very useful along with a handful of capture templates.
I use, but I don't find that I really need to track daily TODO's most of the time. But when I have lots of small-tasks to manage, I turn back to it. I do think that emacs and org-mode can lend themselves to excessive yak-shaving; but if you get everything working, then maybe you can settle into it. I did use org-mode to track my pathfinder roleplaying character, which worked fine.
I've tried using it for document production, but found it too restrictive. I've not tried it for literate programming, as I still find RStudio and MATLAB better for IDE's for R and MATLAB respectively.
I tried organizing everything with org-mode, and burned out a bit on it. That however wasn't org-mode's fault, but rather my attempt at "GTDizing" everything.
Now, I still use org-mode for project notes, at work or as hobby, usually (but not forcibly) one file that starts out very freely and gets more levels/organization over time.
The key for me is that I don't have to adhere to some organization, I can also just jot things down without structure or reason. But I may often reach a point where organization sets in beneficially.
I've been keeping a "work log", recording what I've worked on every day for the past 5+ years.
Initially I used markdown, but I recently switched to org-mode. Initially I'd just copy/paste commands and output, and create daily todo-lists for myself.
Now I find I'm learning more and the use is spreading into other areas.
I put together a simple example of my worklog here, in case it is at all inspiring:
Exactly what I’ve done. Tab-hiding headers for previous months/days is what drew me from markdown. More “advanced” featured have trickled in throughout the years, as needed.
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...
That's a nice idea! If you'd be interested in coming up with a mock-up please send it through to me. My email is on my github page, which is linked in the footer of the new website :)
What is it particularly about open source that it cannot attract designers? Can’t they have similar skin in the game as engineers. I’m sure it would look good on a designers portfolio if they did the design/branding for a project like org mode.
To be frank, the site looks a lot better but it went from 4 decades dated to 1 decade dated.
Hmm, you got a lot of snark, but I'm going to attempt to actually answer this!
I've seen "better designed" open source pages, but they tend to send the wrong message. When you see a mostly-well-designed open source page, your brain just feels like you're being tricked. You feel like someone's trying to charge you for something, or it just feels wrong.
Design is contextual, and what we think of as "well-designed" tends to be from a SaaS perspective, and that sends the wrong message. You see it and think "oh, this is a SaaS product," and your brain just feels weird.
This is true for all design. In markets, generic brands use a worse design to signal they're "cheaper," cereals for kids use cartoons, etc. The vibe needs to match the product, or else your brain sets off alarm bells.
Open Source projects use design to project what they value. Org mode for Emacs should feel like... a site for emacs. Simple, clear, no frills. Whereas a site like Prettier looks nicer, because that's the whole point.
(Also, separate "design" from "usability"... this site isn't pretty, but I can find everything I need super easily!)
Simple answer might be open source contributors don’t respect the work designers do as much as other environments and as a result don’t create communities that attract them.
Eh, this seems a bit presumptuous. I'd be more inclined to suggest that the people who code this projects are usually not designers, and they attract other contributors based on the code not any visual design... so as much as it would be nice for a designer to jump in and work on a visual overhaul I'd expect it to be unfortunately uncommon.
> Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that skilled professionals don't work on someone else's hobbies for free?
No, because the premise is open source projects which developers, skilled professionals, work on.
My real hypothesis, by the way, is that designers have been trained from early on not to do free work. The “work for exposure” meme captures this pathos.
> No, because the premise is open source projects which developers, skilled professionals, work on.
You do understand that designers do have free will and a developer can't simply order one to work for free on someone else's hobby just because he could use specialized hep, don't you?
It seems you're entirely oblivious to the very nature of FLOSS software, where practically all projects are born as a single individual's hobby, and some of them happen to grow way past the single-developer stage. With that in mind, what exactly leads you to believe that designers have no free will of their own and simply spend their days working on someone else's hobby just because he could use the specialized help?
Case in point: my default reaction to see SaaS-style "pretty" page is to close the tab. I have my reasons to avoid SaaS as much as possible, so if my brain pattern-matches your site to a "generic SaaS" design, I almost immediately lose interest.
Am I a minority? Maybe. But then, I'm also org mode's target audience.
I’m not saying this page can’t be improved. I am saying, however, that people pattern match when viewing websites, and the open source aesthetic is a very consistent aesthetic. And the impression the design projects is more important than it being aesthetically pleasing.
Think about Lowes vs West Elm. Both sell things for homeowners. But you can tell from their aesthetics what to expect. Lowes could copy the aesthetic of an Apple store, but it would feel very “off”.
Have you seen emacs? It ain’t pretty. But it’s effective and works for a certain type of person. This aesthetic fits the emacs aesthetic. If this site was too polished and pretty, people would expect a polished and pretty product.
It indicates it won’t be easy to use this product, and it works to attract the correct user. If it was beautiful, people would have different expectations for the tool. This design indicates it’ll require work to set up and understand.
In the same way this site would never work for a nice macOS app, a Panic site wouldn’t work for this tool.
> To be frank, the site looks a lot better but it went from 4 decades dated to 1 decade dated.
Not all of us view the last decade of web "design" as an improvement. There's a lot of poorly-functioning crap on websites in 2020 that frankly doesn't even look pretty.
Landing pages are not a super interesting problem to solve design-wise, they've have been optimized for decades now, to a point where most creativity goes to content and copywriting.
Of course you can make it really special, but I assume anything that requires extra developer hours will be prioritized against other requirements.
---
That being said, this '4 decades dated to 1 decade dated' is not an useful way to criticize a design. Great design is atemporal.
You could try to mention specific things do you don't like about it. Or at the very least, emotions it causes in you.
> I assume anything that requires extra developer hours
Not sure why I was downvoted but this was my question, though I should've framed it nicer. I'm curious why there aren't more designers (even understudies) contributing to OSS, even to build their portfolio, in a similar way SWEs do.
> That being said, this '4 decades dated to 1 decade dated' is not an useful way to criticize a design. Great design is atemporal.
I'm no designer but this seems absurd to me. Judging designs temporally seems to be commonplace. The new site feels like a period of design ruled by Bootstrap which new designs are using less than ever.
I also agree it's not in good taste to be critiquing of open source and reduced funding projects but I'm curious about the talent-attraction mechanics. We should be able to talk about that.
With that said, kudos to them for getting it out! Heres to hoping more designers dive into OSS :)
I'd say that it's common to complain about how old a design looks, but that sure doesn't make much sense 9 times out of 10. A lot of the work that goes into making websites look pretty winds up making them harder to use and slower to load. Give me links and simple colors any day.
The old site looked liked it's exported from org-mode files. New site looks less like that. Probably still done by exporting the same org files in emacs.
The workflow to build that site is completely different from what most web designers are accustomed.
Can confirm, this is an org file export. Much of the difficulty here was the hackery involved 'escaping' the restrictions of the generated HTML. For example, take a look at this: "margin-left: min(calc(0px - var(--body-left) - var(--body-padding)), calc(30rem - 50vw - 0.5var(--body-left) + 0.5var(--body-right)))". That took a while, and some head scratching :P
That's cool, but why are you calculating CSS attributes dynamically at export time instead of just writing a stylesheet and putting that in an export theme? Separating presentation from content, etc.
I'm not a programmer. Over the years, I've spent a lot of time on HN.
I do freelance writing and I blog and I've been repeatedly told "Get a real job. Quit expecting writing to pay. It doesn't."
I briefly was interested in trying to contribute to open source as a non programmer. I've seen other non programmers ask about contributing to open source.
It's a really unwelcoming environment for non programmers. Even people who are programmers and wanting to get into open source talk about how difficult it can be to get involved. Now dial that up a few notches for people who don't program, think differently, communicate differently and are frequently looked down upon by programmers because programmers make good money and many of them are openly contemptuous of people who don't make good money and are often openly contemptuous of the kind of work they do, as if what they do takes less smarts, isn't as valuable, etc.
The original author of Org mode is an astrophysicist. The current maintainer is a Philosopher by study. I've found that the Org community seems to come from a wide range of backgrounds, and is generally quite welcoming.
I think OSS projects are a bit like Companies --- each one has its own culture, and attracts different sorts of people.
If you're interested in getting involved, please don't hesitate to introduce yourself on the mailing list :)
From my perspective, you also do a poor job of communicating with newcomers. It is not readily clear what this is and why they should be interested and the language is intimidating for an outsider/non-programmer.
If it were my website, I would remove the descriptors under your big links for Features, Install, Quickstart and Contribute. They add no real value and are just visual clutter, which is a problem when delivering information-dense content. In fact, I would remove the giant unicorn head in the very valuable above-the-fold section to make space for those four links, minus the extraneous descriptors. (Edit: By descriptors, I mean the part where you say extra stuff like "Yes. Do this." I don't mean the four one-word labels listed above.)
I would also remove "via" and "or" from your section indicating how people can provide financial support. I would either say "Support:" or "We take" or have no extra words and just post the three payment links.
Random thoughts from someone who knows absolutely nothing about this and has never before looked at your website, so take it with a grain of salt:
I wonder why you don't have a link to the Reddit sub r/orgmode.
In order to be more approachable for newbs without losing any vital info, I would reverse some of the initial info, something like this:
Keep notes, maintain to-do lists, plan projects, author documents, create computational notebooks, write literate programming and do so much more. All in a fast and effective plain text system.
An open-source extensible major mode for Emacs offering convenient plain text markup and more.
Also, if there is already some collection somewhere online of stories about people who have used this, I would link to it somewhere in this sentence:
Nearly every Org user has a story to tell about how Org enables and empowers them
If you wish to use any of the above, please feel free. If you wish to credit me to some degree for some of it, my name is Doreen Traylor and doreentraylor.com redirects to a site that is the closest thing to a business card that I have.
I feel like the issue is the management of newbies and bullies “at scale”. The doers/users ratio is incredibly low online, may it be opensource projects, b2c e-commerce, and other online activities.
The web allows for that incredible ratio, letting us feel accessibility is the new normal where it is actually just an unsustainable burden that leads to poor users experience.
“Contempt” feels more like a consequence than a cause to me.
As someone who has been on the receiving end of that contempt, I don't happen to agree with you. I don't believe I deserve any of the contempt I've gotten over the years and I absolutely see the contempt with which I am treated as something that actively closes doors in my face and is not a consequence of my "failure" to contribute or something.
Below is something of an explanation as to why I don't think I deserve contempt. It is not a rant, though I imagine it will be interpreted as such by some people. I'm always damned if I do and damned if I don't here.
I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN (under a different handle). It's 100 names but it isn't a stable list, so there have been more than 100 people on it over the years. (Edit to add context: HN currently gets around 5 million unique visitors each month.)
If my data is accurate -- and I believe it is -- that means less than one percent of those names is an openly female member and I'm it. That puts me in a "league of my own."
For comparison purposes: I believe six percent of CEOs in the US are female and 17 percent of senior personnel (in the "C suite") are female. Yet I am routinely told it is somehow my fault I don't fit in here, my fault I am treated so badly, my fault I am poor, sexism/classism/etc are not a factor in my intractable poverty, etc. ad nauseum.
Just to be crystal clear: I am not talking trash about HN. I spend so much time here because this forum is so much better than other forums.
The problem is not HN. The problem is far larger than HN and this means you can't escape it anywhere, not even on HN which is generally a bastion of virtue in my eyes.
And before someone leaps up with the oh-so-tired accusation that I am obsessed with meaningless, worthless internet points and having a lot of karma here means nothing: It used to be pretty common on HN for men to say to other men here "You must be smart and competent because you have so much karma on HN!" That seems to have died down a good bit since I began pointing out that men do that here to other men and then do nothing but malign me any time I talk about how much karma I have to try to support some point or other I am trying to make.
In some sense, I don't care about karma points here. I use it as an easily referenced proxy for other things that are even harder to talk about in other ways.
Upvotes suggest I am deemed to be someone who "adds value" here. Yet no amount of adding value here comes back to me as significant professional respect, traction and -- critically -- income. Meanwhile, some of the men on the leader board are self-made millionaires and, in at least some cases, they got wealthy in part due to using HN to network and make professional contacts, something I very much wanted to use HN for but it has mostly been a bust for me.
I also don't care to see someone jump up and volunteer that they, also, have not managed to use HN to network or make money so "obviously" it's not my gender (or some other trait of mine). "Stuff just happens."
Yeah, I've heard it all before. It really doesn't hold water.
Not everyone uses HN that way, but some people do so successfully. It has actively been a goal of mine and I seem to make nearly zero headway on such goals.
I guess if “looks fine” is the goal it definitely achieved that. There is definitely huge gap between software quality and design quality in the OSS work and I’m wondering why.
I think probably a lot of self selection. I would guess most people get involved with open source so because the technical problems being solved are interesting. I would guess the people who choose to work on emacs don’t necessarily care about web design. I think most open source web frameworks have pretty decent design!
I personally think it's an aesthetic choice at this point. I actually kind of like it.
I've come to associate the borderline absurdity of logos for open source projects with projects I like at this point, and I do think these kinds of logos are almost a shibboleth for certain kinds of software. I'd say it's less about not knowing how to do "better" or driving away designers and more about signaling "hey, this is NOT corporate software." I've always considered it as a community thing and a cultural quirk more than anything else. To come in and say "this unicorn is ugly, let me fix that for you" would be to misunderstand a lot of things about the context that the software exists in IMO.
Maybe because open source software projects are not design driven? If you do something for free, don't you want to call the shots? If designers would come up with a design, which volunteer programmer would implement it?
> I’m sure it would look good on a designers portfolio if they did the design/branding for a project like org mode.
I can't think of a more challenging "client" to take on than a decentralized group of engineers. Classic ways to build your design portfolio usually centre around small businesses, community groups, events and non-profits because they have clear needs that are easily served by design.
Another place where designers play is with open source/license fonts, icons, design systems etc. which makes sense because they are designing things for their peers.
It definitely has more features than anyone needs, but there is some real gold in this library. org-capture and org-agenda are incredibly useful to me.
Nah, not even close (but I can see someone getting that impression from the landing page). To various extents it can replace:
- a task manager
- an outliner
- Jupyter notebooks
- Evernote (and other bookmarking and note capture systems)
- LaTeX, DocBook, and equivalent (although you fall back on LaTeX for math)
+ really good keyboard shortcuts
+ better header structure
+ better tables
+ calendar
+ interactive multi-language literate programming environment
+ some other stuff that I don't use
Org mode supports adding metadata to the whole document (a la pandoc, frontmatter) and any node. There are a lot of properties (dates, settings, user defined ...).
With pandoc, the frontmatter metadata are only used when exporting the document. With org mode, the metadata are also used during editing, executing code, etc.
Turns out this is me mis-remembering. They're basically identical.
Probably it's just org-mode's useful built-in shortcuts for moving the headers around and folding them that made me think it was better in that regard.
Presumably there are markdown editors with similar behaviour.
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