Just tried Org-mode today

Linux@lemmy.ml – 76 points – 1 years ago

Always heard about org mode but was intimidated by emacs when I could barely manage vi/vim (sorry guys). Installed a plugin for org-mode for Sublime Text today and... shit, why didn't I try this sooner?

I have thousands of text files with horrible organization, thrown around multiple directories, no common naming scheme, no hierarchy, no unified notation, just ramblings and a barely marginal attempt at organization using === as title markers. I have links and ideas buried deep and I didn't want to use a third party tool "just for managing text".

Well, my eyes are open, and thus I'm euphoric, enlightened by its brilliance. I must rewrite all my stuff in org-mode.

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I use org mode extensively, and yeah, gotta admit it's nice.

My biggest gripe is the amount of typing it still takes to annotate stuff. I often find it hard to keep up e.g. taking live notes in a class settings.

For instance, starting a new document and typing:

  #+BEGIN_TITLE
  Class XYZ Notes
  #+END_TITLE

Then later on I wanna insert a code segment, and, gotta:

  #+BEGIN_SRC javascript
  $var = "ooh, cool code, bro.";
  #+END_SRC

(yeah, C-c C-, s works, but I gotta remember that exists, and then also ewww generates in lowercase -- uppercase that shortcut output!)

And then I find I want a table, so lots of "|"s

There's probably better faster shortcuts for lots of this, but like everything in emacs, it's finding and learning them. Typically I need some downtime to do that, which doesn't happen if I'm e.g. trying to take notes quickly.

Anyway, despite this, I gotta agree org mode is really helpful. Happying org'ing to you!

-- Pat

You can do #+TITLE: titletext instead for titles at least, also I guess the table stuff is reasons to do emacs because you only need to do the first | and then pressing tab/enter like excel does the rest

You can use yasnippet or tempel with tempel-collections to create blocks from templates without having to write them all by yourself (https://github.com/mattiasdrp/pokemacs/blob/main/init.org#tempel for example)

Thanks for the encouragement. I suppose I can make a macro or a temporary marker to replace them for proper syntax like you described when I'm in a hurry? I first have to transform some of the notes I'm using to org-mode syntax first so I can get used to this.

Reading the docs it feels close to markdown, but most markdown implementations have a much simpler format for code blocks with syntax specified:
```javascript
$var = "ooh, cool code, bro.";
```

Will turn into:

$var = "ooh, cool code, bro.";

(Though lemmy-ui doesn't seem to support syntax highlighting.)

For the tables you can do 'M-x org-table-create' which then asks you for dimensions and makes it for you.

I think org-capture might help you with the other stuff, you can set up templates and access them by pressing 'C-c c' and get it all inserted in whatever org file and under whatever heading you want.

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