
Org-mode 9.4 is out. Can you help? - bzg
https://bzg.fr/en/org-mode-9.4-is-out-can-you-help.html
======
hpoe
Just want to throw out there I switched to emacs about 3 months ago after
being a long time vimmer, one of the first things I was told was to check out
org-mode as it was one of the greatest features of emacs.

I heartily agree, after about a month I now do all my document authoring, PDF,
LaTex, HTML, personal wiki notes, all of it goes in .org files. It was low
barrier to productivity, and not much more effort to turn org mode into a
powerful idea and through organizer as well as documentation.

Beyond that I can author in org mode and then export to tex, to pdf, to html,
to markdown to whatever I want using org mode.

If you are a long time vimmer do yourself a favor make the next tech you learn
be org-mode in doom-emacs. It is insanely powerful and I will never go back.

~~~
jonnycomputer
I made the mistake of trying to author a scientific paper in org-mode. Big
mistake. I should have just stuck with LaTeX, because what ended up happening
is that all my problems and difficulties had to do with me navigating org-mode
wrappers around LaTeX, when I could just have dealt with LaTeX directly.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people to tell me that I'm wrong.

~~~
eigenhombre
I've written a few hundred Org mode docs, and a doctoral thesis in LaTeX.

I would not write a complex technical paper in Org Mode, other than just to
get my thoughts together initially to eventually copy/paste into LaTeX.

But, Org Mode is good enough for most of my writing over the last several
years. It is more readable as plain text, and exports to HTML or PDF trivially
(the latter via the LaTeX export hook). I like it enough that I use it as the
basis of my blog, exporting each article to HTML and then massaging the HTML
programmatically to generate static files styled and cross-linked the way I
want. This approach gives me math formulas via MathJax, still images, tables,
code snippets... basically everything I want for a somewhat tech-y blog.

But, yeah, if you're going to just write a full-on technical paper for
publication, I'd go right to LaTeX.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I agree with this. I often write up notes in Org mode, but, after trying for a
while to have all of my 'sources' in Org, I also came to the conclusion that
for actual papers, it's far better just to write them directly in LaTeX (other
than initial notes).

------
Sodaware
It's not an exaggeration to say that org-mode changed my life. I started using
it after my first year as a freelancer; I was really struggling to get myself
organized and was prepping myself to get out of software entirely.

Switching to org-mode helped me keep on top of everything in a way I'd never
really experienced before. Since then I've expanded my usage of org
considerably - I use it for taking notes, tracking my diet+exercise, and
planning out my projects (more info here:
[https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-
org/](https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-org/)).

It's not everybody's cup of tea, but for me it fits my mental models better
than anything I've ever used.

~~~
sasaf5
Are you me? :) I use a very similar org table to calculate my nutrition, only
with separate columns for macronutrients. I don't have an update function like
yours, though.

    
    
      | -1 | req. | 100 | 100 |  50 |               
      |  3 | milk | 2.92| 4.37|  3.5|
      |  # |      |-91.2|-86.8|-39.5|             
      #+TBLFM: @>$3..$5=(@<$1..@>>$1)*(@<..@>>)

------
danShumway
Org-mode is the reason I started using Emacs in the first place.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more important tool in my
productivity/organization toolbelt, it's become a really important part of my
notetaking process. It's not perfect by any means (exporting to other formats
in particular is kind of messy), but it's an insanely powerful platform that
does a ton of stuff, and is just really flexible without being too
overwhelming. At the end of the day, everything is just text, so you can get
in really deep with scheduling and capture templates, or you can just write
out nice TODO lists.

Also check out Orgzly on Android if you're looking for a mobile client. Works
pretty well with a Syncthing setup, or you can host your notes on a platform
like Dropbox if you think that's easier.

~~~
sasaf5
For an Android client I just run it directly in a terminal emulator (Termux).
Works well enough with the software keyboard (but a bluetooth keyboard brings
real glory).

------
dctoedt
It appears that the OP, @bzg, is Bastien Guerry, the current maintainer of
org-mode — Bravo Zulu, Bastien! (By a happy coincidence, "Bravo Zulu" or just
"BZ" is a U.S. Navy expression for "well done," defined in the publication
ATP-1. [0].)

[0]
[https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu](https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu)

~~~
sn41
Does bzflag have something to do with this term?

~~~
dctoedt
> _Does bzflag have something to do with this term?_

Not so far as I know.

~~~
officemonkey
BZflag, the tank game, is named after "Battle Zone", the original Atari tank
game.

~~~
dctoedt
Ah - I have fond memories of that one, played on a machine that took quarters
IIRC!

------
lootsauce
I'm a UI developer, never used Org-Mode, not a VIM or Emacs user. But I am
very interested in document creation, note taking, organizing workflows.
Please forgive the lack of background in this question but...

Can someone explain to me why if org-mode is so popular it is not used in
places other than emacs or why is it bound to emacs? Is there some ux quality
or set of features that are bound up in the unique key-bindings of Emacs or
the scripting integration for example? Could any of this goodness make it's
way to more accessible (for your average user) venues such as a basic GUI note
taking app?

~~~
trobertson
Org mode is great because it does 2 things extremely well:

1\. Document structure. Folding, tree structures, linking, etc. are done very
well in org-mode. But that's not unique to org-mode, several other solutions
do that well.

2\. org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your
document - restricted to sections. This is amazing, as it basically gives you
an entire application layer in your text documents.

Where by entire layer, I mean having your calendar, email, programming
environments, etc. all within your notes. org-mode used this way is not merely
a document editor. It is the best plain-text workflow enabler the world has
ever seen.

And you can't do this outside of Emacs without essentially rewriting Emacs.
Emacs _is_ the strength that org-mode leverages. org-mode is a unification of
the many and varied Emacs major modes into a simple plain-text environment.

And the best part is, you only need to use the particular modes you want. Your
org-mode experience is tailored around your use case. You bring in the mode
you want in that section and you're done. It just works.

~~~
da39a3ee
> org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your
> document - restricted to sections.

> You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just
> works.

I haven't used org in a non-superficial way for a while. What are you
referring to here, src blocks?

------
iLemming
I think it would be great if the development of Org has moved to Gitlab or
GitHub, i.e. simplified the contribution process.

~~~
bzg
Can you elaborate a bit more on how this would simplif the contribution
process?

Perhaps it would make it more familiar, but I don't think it would really
simplify it.

First because I think issue handling on GitLab/GitHub kinda worsen the problem
of the lack of maintainance resources, instead of fixing it

Second because we are quite strict on how to format changelog entries, and I
believe email interactions help educating contributors in a nice way, while
MR/PR interactions might generate more fatigue -- not so sure about this one,
though.

~~~
whelming_wave
I can't speak for others, but I'm driven away from contributing to projects
that use mailing lists because there's a high barrier to entry, and here's a
source of other people having the same issue[1] to corroborate my anecdote a
little.

[1]:
[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/)

~~~
cxr
I'm no defender of mailing lists as a substitute for real bugtrackers (I'm
fairly strongly against it, actually), but GitHub is also apt to drive people
away more than its fans admit.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24378401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24378401)

There's also the matter of its privacy controls being extremely lacking. It's
another site that takes the position that you don't get a choice on everything
being "social" now, so they'll index your activity on a central timeline
whether you ask for it or not and broadcast it to anyone else who does ask for
it, leaving you with no recourse except to opt-out entirely.

~~~
whelming_wave
I agree that Github is not the solution the open source community is looking
for, and feel the pain of the lacking privacy controls. Still, I feel that
development on Github is much more accessible than that on a mailing list, and
there's probably a solution which would be more accessible but still encourage
people who aren't part of the mailing list culture to contribute.

For example, mrsh has its development on sr.ht[1], but accepts pull requests
on Github or the mailing list for the project[2]. This seems like (almost) the
best of both worlds to me, where people who want to use a mailing list can,
and people who want to use a GUI can, though there is overhead for the
maintainers to fuse together the results at the end. An alternative like Gitea
or GitLab might be better for your mentioned privacy concerns while still
lowering the barrier to entry that a mailing list workflow presents.

Design is not my passion, so I'm drastically underqualified to comment on
whether any of these websites is an effective implementation of their ideas.

[1]: [https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh](https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh)

[2]:
[https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh#contributing](https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh#contributing)

------
wsdookadr
This was predictable. A software package shouldn't be in continous evolution.
Org didn't really follow GNU philosophy. That's what commercial software like
Microsoft Office does. They keep changing it without adding any value. Org
should've been the opposite, future-proof, solid and robust.

I'm not sure what the situation with the tests accompanying Org is, but in
order to build future-proof software, tests are mandatory, comprehensive
documentation is also very important. There's another element which I haven't
really seen with Org, a clear idea of when and where to stop. As previously
mentioned, the development phase of software should always have an end, in
sight. The cases where software is developed for 2+ decades is very rare. This
is mainly related to requirements and to the goal of the software, and I think
this is something that wasn't done for Org. It's unclear where Org ends.

It's interesting that Org could never have evolved out of some committee
super-formal development environment (with tons of managers, SCRUM masters,
architecture boards, etc), but at the same time it is an expertiment out of
control. It's very dense and rich in ideas, but also in chaos (I guess we
can't really have the former without the latter).

Still I think the parts that distinguish Org from all other dynamic document
formats, and from all other markup formats is that.. it's the most advanced,
it was there before asciidoc or reStructuredText. Org is a pioneer in many
ways.

------
Erlangen
I hope more project maintainers would call for help if it's needed. I am using
org mode everyday, but I don't know org needs more contributors. That being
said, I am definitely willing to help occasionally.

Thanks for bring the message out, bzg.

------
djhworld
I’ve recently started to get back into emacs and org, via doom emacs. Will see
how it goes.

How are people handling getting org files on multiple devices, with sync
support etc. Dropbox?

~~~
pgronkievitz
I'm using synchronization via Nextcloud. It's nice, because of webdav, but
Dropbox is as nice as this, because Orgzly supports both of them

------
grassy
I just wanted to come here to say that I started learning emacs in the
beginning of the pandemic. I'm going to start my first year of masters and I'm
going full on emacs. Literally one of my big wants in life is to help free
software.. I still have a lot of learning to do to get to a point where I can
actually contribute, but I hope one day I can indeed help

~~~
bzg
Where there is a will, there is a way. Don't hesitate to join Org's mailing
list and lurk there for a while, you'll learn enough to contribute soon.

------
tomerbd
org mode for vim would be great

~~~
juandazapata
Magit for vim would be great

~~~
agumonkey
I'm not a vimmer but I was under the impression that both of them were ported

~~~
skosch
I don't know about vimagit, but vim's org-mode support is very barebones.

Give doom-emacs a try though. You really can have the best of both worlds
nowadays.

------
SomaticPirate
The Emacs news the past few days has been disheartening.

I was genuinely considering learning org-mode and giving another go at using
Emacs as my primary editor. Now I'm worried if it still makes sense to do
that.

Clearly a lot of people still find Emacs useful but the ecosystem seems too
hard to break into. I'm still curious why Emacs hasn't obtained the same level
of excitement as other editors like Vim and VS Code.

~~~
kstrauser
What news did you see that was disheartening? The only story I was was that
helm is being put to pasture, but that's very separate from Emacs itself.

I think Emacs has missed some of the excitement of, say, VSCode because until
recently it hasn't had many opinionated guides to using it (like Spacemacs or
Doom Emacs). I've overheard a lot of conversations like:

New user: OK, got it installed! Now what should I do?

Emacser: Anything you want!

New user: I want to write Python. What's a good way to do that?

Emacser: Here's 47 similarly named but substantially different Python modes.
Choose the one you like!

New user: Which one do _you_ like?

Emacser: I started with one I found in a GitHub gist, then modified it to do
remote editing over a 3270 terminal. You should check it out!

New user: ...

There's a _lot_ to be said for the VSCode approach of "here's the golden path
to doing ${thing}. Once you've learned it, you might try the alternatives to
see if some are a better fit for you." Alternatively, consider the analogy of
a Linux distro that gives you a well configured KDE or Gnome environment, but
that lets you switch to another DE once you've been using it for a while. Now
Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are providing that experience to new users, and I've
heard more excitement about Emacs in the last couple of years than in the
previous decade.

~~~
loosetypes
I love emacs but lately I’ve been feeling this approach is very much at odds
with today’s expectation of per-project convention-flexibility within a
dialect, a la prettier.

~~~
kstrauser
Truthfully, I feel kind of the same way. There are parts of my
.emacs.d/init.el that go back 25 years, so I'm not saying this from the
position of "I tried it last week and it wasn't like my other editors so I
don't like it."

One of the things I love about VSCode, and that made me seriously evaluate it
in the first place, is how easy it is to configure per-project settings like
"use this virtualenv when editing these files". In VSCode, that looks like
having one window per project and this works great. When I'm in the middle of
working on one thing, I can quickly open a second window, hack on something,
close that window, and get back to what I was doing. Since Emacs has one flat
memory space, that's not nearly so easy.

I love Emacs and would go back to using it in a heartbeat if it were half so
easy to set up and maintain a working Python development environment with all
the bells and whistles, but so far I haven't found that to be the case.

~~~
theCodeStig
Direnv and lsp-mode

