iconunforged comments on Personal information management - Less Wrong

14 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 11 September 2012 11:40AM

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Comment author: latanius 12 September 2012 12:13:21AM 2 points [-]

Anyone using org-mode here? It's free, cross-platform, and also has links (to arbitary files!), outlines (actually, the whole thing is mostly about hierarchical headings), you can use it using mostly the keyboard only, and there are also some Android / iPhone apps (however, I haven't tried them yet).

It has the added benefit that headings have nice colors (especially with a white on black color theme), so if you put it on full screen everyone gets the impression that you're doing something complicated and useful thing. (Even if you're just churning out notes about how to improve your time management as a quite nice & recursive way of procrastination.)

(And yes, it's an emacs mode, actually this is the reason I ended up using emacs for all kinds of other things...)

Additional note: linking to all kinds of files can be an awesome tool when building maps of big and ugly software systems.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 September 2012 03:08:42PM 1 point [-]

As much as I like org-mode (and I like it so much that I don't see myself changing systems unless someone comes along and refines the hell out of org-mode under a new name), I've wished for more from it. Perhaps I ought to just get to work learning more emacs, but some trivial inconveniences and vague desires I've encountered so far:

  • I've not been able to get the Android app working. Ever. Maybe if I go back and put 40 more minutes into getting it to work.
  • I'd love to work with a high-contrast, white-on-black background. I've still not learned how to do this, even with a fair bit of looking
  • If I could switch to a full-screen (not just maximized, but distraction-free, maximum visibility full-screen) that would be fantastic.
  • I sync my org-file (yeah, I only use one, and it's huge) with Dropbox. Don't have to worry about losing it if anything goes dead. But I really just wish that Evernote did all the same stuff. Because Evernote has a slick look, and a pretty great Android app. And I'd be willing to pay money for such a slick implementation of my huge org-file.
  • I use Astrid as a todo-manager. It's not a bad system (even though I've had some obnoxious database corruption issues every month or so), but what I'd really like is a similar system (and there are so many todo managers out there that have the same features, and they're always adding more) that could just read the TODOs out of my org-file and append the appropriate tags, etc. I could see myself someday knowing enough emacs lisp to figure this out on the org-mode end, but right now I don't plan on learning enough programming to work this out as a supplementary app, and it looks far, far simpler to just offer a bounty on this kind of thing that someone else can program.
Comment author: latanius 23 September 2012 08:16:18PM 0 points [-]

Oh, yes. I do Dropbox syncing, too (this is the other good thing about org-mode: plain text files). And there might be some truth in the statement that while org-mode is excellent for a single file, things start to be less seamless when it comes to more of them... inter-file links don't seem to be that reliable, for example. Is this the reason for your One Big Org File?

For white on black, it's just (setq default-frame-alist '((background-color . "black") (foreground-color . "white"))) in your .emacs.

Actually, it's kind of typical lesswrong that I started off with a comment popularizing org-mode, but ended up changing my mind about it (well... kind of), the newest experiments include Notational Velocity (they seem to be good at the global search stuff org-mode is lacking, but not so nice indented lists locally), and also this system:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/book.pdf

which includes paper notebooks, maps of your thoughts and similar fancy stuff, but I haven't yet finished reading it (it's long and not exactly the most organized stuff I've ever read... but it has good ideas.)

Comment author: jwhendy 20 October 2014 11:20:58PM *  0 points [-]

For links, I switched to the org-id module and a unique ID for any new links. It works as long as the file containing the target headline is in the same directory as the file containing the link.

(require 'org-id)

(global-set-key "\C-cl" 'org-store-link)

(setq org-link-to-org-use-id 'create-if-interactive)

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