
Productivity in Plaintext - luxpir
http://lukespear.co.uk/plaintext-productivity
======
luxpir
Any questions on this I'm happy to answer. The link to the examples repo is at
the end of the post, or here for convenience:

[https://github.com/luxpir/plaintext-
productivity](https://github.com/luxpir/plaintext-productivity)

Summary: A to-do list and calendar template for low-resource, quick management
of work and personal life. Also included for good measure are a .vimrc and
.muttrc file to borrow from.

------
wanderfowl
I love the idea of this, but sadly, it only works when your work is in
Plaintext. I'm an audio and graphing sort of guy, and although I try to be in
Plaintext as much as I can, it's a constant battle.

One other loss is cross-device compatibility for things like calendaring. I
totally get why text calendars are great, but I check my calendar from my
phone or tablet enough that I couldn't rely on SSH. And losing calendar based
alarms would be tough.

Mutt is great, though. And respect for sticking to an aesthetic :)

~~~
luxpir
Yep, that checks out :)

Just a thought. Would sharing the files via Dropbox (shudder) or similar
(rsync/syncthing) work on your devices?

That would then rely on a local text editor to edit or just the built-in web-
browser if you automated a regular :TOhtml export from vim. Suppose that
starts to get a little cumbersome for some use cases. Admittedly I don't have
to check my calendar that often. My to-do list, perhaps though.

~~~
wanderfowl
I already do that, actually, via Dropbox (shudder). But plaintext based
systems, particularly the symbol-heavy ones, suck terribly on virtual
keyboards.

------
AstralStorm
It is fine and dandy until you get to cooperate (e.g. share task lists) or
especially use machines not configured by yourself. The productivity is a
third or less then in my experience.

Then it's a losing battle to keep compatibility between your custom solution
and everyone elses. To add insult to injury, few of the mainstream tools allow
proper import and export which could be automated.

And plenty of web tools don't even allow easy access to single functions, you
get to deal with whole AJAX, cookies and all the mess... Bonus if the tool is
closed, then it is a large reverse engineering effort.

~~~
luxpir
So... nothing's ideal yet?

How does cooperation work with org-mode, taskwarrior or hnb (mentioned below)?
Are you describing a more general problem with local productivity software?

A simple sharing service, version control or rsyncing the files to a simple
webserver at regular intervals would be an option for sharing. Not something
I'll have to deal with for now though.

If you've checked out the files I'm not sure how you conclude that one would
lose compatibility any time soon either.

What do you use?

------
noir_lord
Why not just use org-mode? (genuine question not a smart ass question).

~~~
luxpir
Cheers, no I appreciate that. I mention my issues with org-mode in the post,
but it's mainly for simplicity, portability and to save time learning and
configuring (and reconfiguring between versions). It's explained a little more
fully in the post. In fact the system is a bit anti org-mode, or any
productivity software that takes more time to learn (or implement) than to
use.

~~~
noir_lord
Indeed you did, my bad I made it to 5) Email :).

Fair enough whatever works :), though I would point out to anyone reading this
that the learning mode for emacs is open file, save file, type in file.

Also not sure what you mean with portability since emacs is literally just
plain text as well.

Everything else you'll learn as you go - I wonder if I can do _foo_ followed
by I can do _foo_!.

The irony of org-mode is that it made me actually use emacs every day
something nothing else ever has (I've used IDE's for programming since the
late 90's).

~~~
luxpir
I can see why you might not have made it to the end - I get tunnel-vision when
writing sometimes. That's the edited down version!

I think there's a lot of mileage left in the emacs + org-mode for productivity
discussion, so I can completely see where you're coming from. I won't repeat
what I said in the post here, but I'll just reiterate this HN comment[0] from
2 month's back where a frequent user of org-mode complained about backwards-
compatibility. And this isn't an isolated case, the devs are apparently
forging ahead with the simplification of org-mode at the expense of a few
compatibility issues. I don't suppose users of the basic functionality would
notice, but then do those users _need_ all the potential complexity of org-
mode?

I'll also reiterate that, as per the citations in the post, even RMS can't
bring himself to broach the org-mode subject. At least as of 2013.

It probably boils down to there being two camps, those who make full use of
org-mode's features _and_ who enjoy delving into the minutae of configuring
their productivity suites (most likely already emacs users?). And then there
are those who can run their affairs from a paper diary (or who have help), 80s
style, but prefer going digital for all the advantages that brings.

I might be wrong, but I get the strong impression from seeing others use it
that org-mode lets you, even encourages you to operate a system that holds
hundreds of to-do's at any one time. To just get your thoughts into it,
however relevant. I've used systems like that before and I didn't like the
growing stress resulting from the pile-up.

The final thing I'd say is that as one of the world's vim users (is it a 50/50
split vim:emacs?) I just can't bring myself to embrace the chorded keymappings
of emacs. I'd rather learn piano. It'd sure sound nicer.

\--

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10636589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10636589)

------
guide42
Have you tried hierarchical notebook[0]?

[0]: [http://hnb.sourceforge.net/](http://hnb.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
dTal
Is shift-up and shift-down for moving nodes broken for you? I submitted a
patch to Debian (who seem to be the maintainers now) but nobody else seems to
have this problem.

If anyone else does have the problem: add {KEY_SR, "sup"} and {KEY_SF,
"sdown"} to ui_binding.c and change "sprevious" and "snext" to "sup" and
"sdown" in the configuration file.

