

Bye bye iCal, welcome org-mode - codeup
https://khinsen.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/bye-bye-ical-welcome-org-mode/

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agentultra
I use org-mode extensively. It integrates so well into the Emacs experience.
There's just nothing like it.

When I start working on a project, I use todo lists with notes, links, and
tags to manage my tasks. I use org outlines to structure my work flow and
organize my thoughts. I use the remember front-end to quickly capture notes on
the fly. When I finish a task I just flick out the key stroke to clock out.
Afterwards I can check a nicely formatted table to view my hours, paste it
into an email within emacs and use org mode to reformat it into an
HTML/multipart email with a properly formatted HTML table that I can send to
my co-workers or clients to review.

For intense bits of code I use the literate programming features of org-babel.

Also, it has great export features. It can tangle, organize, and mine your org
files for the information you want and export to a number of different
formats. It's quite amazing.

I'd go as far to say that org-mode is practically a killer feature of emacs
and one really good reason for switching to emacs if you don't use it already.

But I might be biased... :)

~~~
abhiyerra
I switched to Emacs after 10 years of Vim because of it. It is quite amazing
how good it is.

~~~
dlsspy
Woah. I had to check the username and date because I swear I wrote that. I was
closer to 15, though.

~~~
agentultra
I was about 10 years give or take myself. I blogged the transition on my site.
Glad I made the decision to give emacs a serious try. Didn't know what I was
missing until I did.

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qjz
I currently use Remind: <http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind>

It's not a plug-in, so you can use any text editor (or install a GUI
frontend). It has a powerful date scripting language that can be complex, but
flexible enough to meet almost any need. Most events can be entered simply on
one line of text and it will handle the sorting, so you can organize entries
however you want (even including them from other files). Multiple output
formats are available. I publish my calendar to my web site in HTML and PDF,
while a cronjob emails a text version to me twice a day.

The only downside is that I end up managing the calendar for the whole family.
I feel uneasy publishing my calendar to the cloud, but I'm considering using
shared Google Calendars so everyone can manage there own schedules.

~~~
rwl
Ah, wow, the "Microsoft Policy" and "Apple Policy" are awesome. Glad to see a
free software project that says, on its front page, that it would "prefer" you
compile and run the software on "a platform that is not controlled by a free-
software-hostile corporation."

~~~
albertzeyer
Except that it just works fine on Mac and is as easy to compile there as on
any other Unix/POSIX system.

I found their attitude against Apple highly annoying. When I clicked on the
source download link (in Chrome), I just got this message:

    
    
      Please do not run Remind on Mac OS
    

Downloading via wget worked though.

Then I started ./configure and I got this:

    
    
      az@74-112 1130 (remind-03.01.10) %./configure
    
      **********************
      *                    *
      * Configuring REMIND *
      *                    *
      **********************
    
    
      Please don't use Apple products.  This script will continue in 30 seconds
      if you insist on compiling Remind on Mac OS X.
    

How stupid is this?

The compilation went just fine.

~~~
rwl
Yes, that _does_ seem a bit over-the-top, compared to the usual configure/make
routine for Free software packages.

But is that the right contrast class?

I wonder how you feel about software that:

\- refuses to run if it detects that it's running on a virtual machine (OS X)

\- refuses to run if it detects that it's running under a debugger (iTunes)

\- refuses to execute programs that aren't cryptographically signed by a
particular vendor (iOS)

To me, a preachy message that doesn't actually interfere with running the
program looks downright friendly by comparison.

~~~
uxp
There is a major difference between being annoying about it's hardware
"preferences", and a legally bound license and it's protection to prevent end-
users from breaking those defined rules (VMs, Debuggers, and cryptographic
DRM). The first doesn't do anything. The second protects profits and secrets.

If the authors of this program decided that they didn't actually like Apple
enough to build in copy protection, that would be fine, but nagging brings out
the hacker in me, and I want to install it on every OS X machine I can get my
hands on, just because they told me not to without a contractual obligation.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I truly don't understand this. Deliberately making the software less useful to
you bothers you more than simply making a request?

Would you prefer it if the software delayed you for 30 seconds while forcing
you to watch commercials, thereby increasing profits?

~~~
uxp
If the software's business model was to be free, but be supported financially
by ads or commercials, then that is still another business model to give
contribution to the authors. It actually does something.

As a user of free and commercial software, I would prefer in my dream world if
everything was free under a BSD-like license. As a programmer, I realize that
I need to feed myself just as the authors of the software I use do. Apple
needs to protect their business model, one of which is that their OS should
only run on hardware they sell. It ensures that their employees and
shareholders can feed themselves and their families.

Compare that to Xchat, which is free in all forms except a Windows Binary.
Reason being it takes significant effort and time to build and test on that
platform. Remind has every opportunity to do something similar, by providing
binaries and source free of charge for any other platform, but to distribute
protection that makes sure that it does not run on OS X without payment or
some other contribution. Just asking, without legally binding the end user, to
not run it on the platform accomplishes and protects absolutely nothing.

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tomstuart
I'm surprised to see this article cite sync as a major problem. I find iCal's
CalDAV support to work very well, and if you're competent enough to use Emacs
then you should also be able to set up your own install of Darwin Calendar
Server (or just use Google Calendar) to sync against.

~~~
jambo
I have used self-hosted Darwin Calendar Server & more recently, Google Apps
for a client that needs iCal syncing. Somehow we seem to have more problems
with CalDAV syncing (e.g. timeouts during sync, unavailability) with Google
Calendar than we ever did on DCS. It seems like, and probably is, an
afterthought for Google.

[edit: ActiveSync, now supported in iCal, seems to work pretty well]

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rwl
The article doesn't mention one of the best features of Org: the "capture"
interface [1]. This makes it possible to quickly file a new entry in the
appropriate Org file, using a custom template, without interrupting your
workflow.

[1]
[http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-_002d-Refile-_002d-Archive...](http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-_002d-Refile-_002d-Archive.html)

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jambo
Also, The Vim Outliner <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=517>

~~~
sigzero
The VimOrganizer is trying to be as close to org-mode as it can be:
<https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer>

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dlsspy
I use ical to pull my exchange and google calendars down, then a bit of
applescript to update org-mode:
[https://github.com/dustin/snippets/blob/master/applescript/i...](https://github.com/dustin/snippets/blob/master/applescript/ical-
to-org-mode.applescript)

It's gross, but it means I can see everything I care about in one place. :)

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kahawe
Maybe I missed it but how/where can you sync all that with your phone then? At
least in the past, this is where the whole Apple "PIM" suite was really
shining for me: effortless syncing with mobile and smart phones without
installing additional tools. And I agree, an easy, built-in option to sync
several Macs would be great.

Oh and complaining about iCal's interface is really moaning at a rather high
level.

At work I have to use Outlook for email, contacts, team calendar and our team
todos and I cannot stop wondering how this thing is used by anyone let alone
tech un-savvy people.. so I thank the FSM for the noodley goodness and
simplicity that iCal is for me.

And I wish Google Mail would finally allow me to update entries from iCal and
offer syncing the todo list. Then I would be completely happy.

~~~
rwl
For iPhone, there's MobileOrg: <http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/>

For Android, there's MobileOrg Android: <https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-
android/wiki/>

Both can be set up to sync Org files via DropBox.

~~~
aerique
I find MobileOrg's workflow clumsy to work with. I wish it would just allow me
to browse a directory in my Dropbox and leave the syncing to Dropbox itself.

~~~
dhess
I'm a MobileOrg user, and I completely agree. I would pay good money for an
app that presents an iOS user interface for editing files with org-mode
markup, including creating org-mode files on the fly. Unfortunately, MobileOrg
offers neither of those features.

MobileOrg _is_ free software (<https://github.com/richard/mobileorg>), but
it's so far from what I'm looking for that it might just be easier to start
from scratch.

