I use Org Mode for personal logging/journalling

I use Org Mode for personal logging/journalling(kevinkle.in)

157 points by kkleindev 4 years ago | 48 comments

rayiner 4 years ago |

Org Mode is amazing! As an attorney I spend a lot of my time taking notes, tracking moving parts, and working with voluminous PDFs. I've tried a lot of different tools over the years (OneNote, etc.) for this purpose, but they all have serious shortcomings. I used to use Emacs in my previous life as a programmer, but had never used Org Mode before. I've got the following workflow:

- Org Mode (with org-superstar) for taking notes. Everything gets saved into a Microsoft OneDrive for sync between my laptop and desktop machine.

- Org tasks and org-agenda for project planning. Far less disruptive to your train of thought than busting out Microsoft Planner to remind yourself to follow-up on some line of research or whatever.

- pdf-tools for viewing PDFs. It's a bit kludgy (it renders PDF pages to PNGs on the fly because that's what Emacs can display), but it's somehow still less CPU-intensive than Acrobat DC or anything based on PDF.js. PDF-tools has fast incremental search, and a fast occurs mode for finding and highlighting all hits in the file.

- pdfgrep and pdfgrep-mode for searching across PDFs. Hits show up in a grep-mode buffer and you can click to jump to the exact hit. (It uses libpoppler under the hood to confine the search to the PDF text layer and show hits in logical page order rather than PDF file order, which can be arbitrary.)

- org-pdftools for creating links to specific pages of specific PDFs in Org Notes (e.g. noting that the testimony for a particular witness starts on page 758 of some 2,000-page trial transcript).

- Built-in Emacs features (windows, frames, buffers) make it easy to juggle between documents and compare them side-by-side. Emacs Bookmarks make it easy to save your place and jump back to where you left off. It's shocking how many notes tools get this wrong and only let you see one document or attachment at a time.

I'm kicking myself for not having discovered this earlier!

kovek 4 years ago | |

Do you have smooth scrolling in Emacs? How do you sync your work with your smartphone?

rayiner 4 years ago | | |

I use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's emacs-mac-port, which has smooth scrolling: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/README-m.... Due to the way Emacs works, pdf-tools can't do "continuous scroll" mode. This doesn't bother me much because I always have PDFs set to show the whole page anyway.

I don't sync Org notes with my smart phone. But the nice thing about Emacs (compared to most other notes tools) is that file attachments are in your file system. One Drive's sync backend is very good and smooth, so it's easy to grab a PDF if I want to attach it to an email or view it from my phone or tablet.

ParetoOptimal 4 years ago | | |

> Do you have smooth scrolling in Emacs?

Yes, but one of the smooth scrolling modes was too slow for me and I use `pixel-scroll-precision-mode` which requires Emacs 29.

> How do you sync your work with your smartphone?

I use syncthing for this and Orgzly, emacs in termux, and organice.

I bet most would prefer and could get away with just using organice.

xenodium 4 years ago |

Interesting to see habits tracked using an org property drawer. I hadn't considered this before. Org itself has habit-tracking support https://orgmode.org/manual/Tracking-your-habits.html using :STYLE: habit.

I'm head-in org land. For habit-tracking, I found removing friction from the tracking process itself absolutely fundmental for longer term success (Atomic Habits, the book, corroborates). Like the author, I also needed mobile access for this. I built https://flathabits.com (powered by org) for this purpose (iOS only). In the end, I found I hardly used Emacs org mode to view or track my habits since the mobile app removed all the trakcing friction. Now I just get peace of mind knowing that I can access the plain text file if I want to.

ps. I also built another org mode app for iOS https://plainorg.com

Arubis 4 years ago | |

Your work is contributing to the org-mode renaissance; users of the world appreciate you! Now if I could just get multi-platform sync working correctly (iCloud doesn't play nice with Linux)...

xenodium 4 years ago | | |

Hey, that's nice to hear. Have you seen some of the syncing alternatives? https://plainorg.com#cloud-providers

Mileage varies across iOS providers, but some users have reported being fairly happy with either WorkingCopy or Syncthing/MöbiusSync which would work on Linux. I'm on iCloud though.

ungamedplayer 4 years ago | | |

WebDAV is the fuuuuuuture.

nonrandomstring 4 years ago |

There's a school of throught, prevalent at the last Emacs conference (See Karl Voit's talk), that Org is also a notation/markup. So-called "org-down" has been put forward with foundational semantics, headings, lists, emphasis and other basics.

https://karl-voit.at/2021/11/27/orgdown/

I'd actually love to see Gemini and HN adopt orgdown. Just sayin... :)

tconfrey 4 years ago | |

Thats the cool thing about org, its not just a great outliner tool and the best markdown, it also covers the full gamut of productivity and personal knowledge management functions (todos, calendaring, linking etc).

That said, what would it mean for HN to adopt orgdown?

BeetleB 4 years ago | | |

It means one can use the orgdown syntax when writing comments.

goosedragons 4 years ago | |

It is. You can use org mode to write a scientific paper, personal wiki, blog posts, do literate programming, etc. I used to use Rmarkdown but I prefer using org now. It has better support for tables which is handy for printing out data frames.

I found out recentishly that GitHub supports org mode too.

Rochus 4 years ago |

Org Mode tries to be an outliner. Outliners are the right tool for the job from my experience (> 30 years) since you can create and use context to reduce redundancy and makes it easier to find and to understand things again retrospectively. I had a look at Org Mode many years ago when switching from Windows to a Linux laptop which meant that I needed an alternative for Ecco Pro. But I quickly reached the limits with Org Mode and a few other tools and finally developed my own tool, which has proven itself over more than a decade in daily use in large, complex projects. A few years ago I released it as open source: https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline

mschaef 4 years ago |

I've been using org mode to maintain a personal work log for around ten years.

General structure is a file per month, a toplevel outline heading per day, and a global hotkey that takes me to 'today' with a single button. I use a private git repository to archive it to a secure place and replicate across different machines if needed. (Not common.)

Code here:

https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d/blob/master/lisp/orglog....

It's worked well, but generally speaking the key to logging is less the code/system and much more the discipline to write every day. I'm hit or miss on that front, but still find it useful to both formalize my thoughts on things into english and also occasionally go back to look at previous things I've done. (Oh, and it makes developing lists of accomplishments for annual reviews an easy thing.)

j7ake 4 years ago |

I did a lot of time logging for orgmode. It was great if ones task are all done on a single computer.

I found trying to synchronise across devices tedious and made me stop logging.

ttrei 4 years ago | |

Started using org-mode a few months ago. I keep my notes and todo list in a self-hosted git repository.

On desktop I use Magit to push/pull changes.

On Android I cloned the repository in Termux and pointed Orgzly to it. This wasn't absolutely trivial, can provide details if needed. Also created some convenience scripts for git operations (commit-and-push, pull, check status). Now I can push/pull changes with singe-letter commands in Termux.

I find the friction to be low enough. Using git is also very convenient to resolve any conflicts in case I forget to push or pull some changes.

kkleindev 4 years ago | |

My current setup is also slightly dissatisfying in that regard. What's nice (or rather a consolation) about orgzly - the mobile app I use - is that upon conflict, it explicitly offers to either choose the remote or the local version. At first I was worried it would simply attempt to always overwrite based on the local version.

kqr 4 years ago | | |

It combines even more nicely with Syncthing, which creates a copy on conflict, which can then easily be merged with ediff-files once I get back to a computer.

tripleSex 4 years ago | |

Just log into a remote shell and execute emacs-org-mode from there. Like, remote shells are free 2022, no? I agree that if all the devices can't generalize to one source then it isn't as rewarding.

kkleindev 4 years ago | | |

Cool idea! I do like to be able to work on it offline, e.g. on planes, though.

bcrosby95 4 years ago | |

I just keep my files in Dropbox and haven't had a problem yet.

sva_ 4 years ago |

I tried using Org and Org-Roam for a while, but I think I gave up on it. The overhead of constantly updating and fiddling to make your config comply with the updates didn't seem worth it. The alternative would be to just stay on an old version, but that goes against my principles of running a rolling release distribution. And hell, if you decided to update after a year or two, you could probably start over with most of your configuration, rather than trying to understand the updates.

BeetleB 4 years ago | |

I rarely need to update my config for Org - they rarely break compatibility. Perhaps once every 2-3 years.

Org roam - that's not a mature project and it frequently breaks. If the current Roam is doing what you need, do not let it upgrade automatically.

TacticalCoder 4 years ago |

I'm a huge Emacs user but I totally suck at org-mode. Now I do use it but mostly for the outlining functionality: I love it that I can quickly collapse/expand by "x levels" (for example only level 1 titles, up to level 2 titles, etc.). But most of all I "search don't sort": it's very common that I "ripgrep" (from Emacs of course) inside my .org files. Even only using like that, without knowing much about it, it's still very useful.

I do version everything under Git so when I switch machines/countries my latest notes are one (ma)git command away.

BeetleB 4 years ago |

> I wrote a script to apply that template to every week and month of the year. Hence $ ls ~/org/weeks/ returns the following:

You don't need this - you can use Org's capture templates with datetree type. It will then have it all in one file with appropriate headings.

Tip I didn't realize for years: Sometimes you forget to log it on the day intended (e.g. for the post-month you log it 5 days after the new month when you should have done it on the 1st day). Prefix your capture command with C-1, and it will prompt you for the date to file it as.

drcongo 4 years ago |

Interesting to see as an entire submission rather than just every other comment.