Organice – Using Org mode from a smartphone or browser [video] | Hacker News Reader

Organice – Using Org mode from a smartphone or browser [video]

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111 pointspreek33 comments

This is one of two lightning talks I was holding at EmacsConf 2019[1].

By now, organice has naturally evolved even further - for example it features WebDAV support. With that, organice can potentially be used with a multitude of synchronization backends: Client/Server services ownCloud, Nextcloud and Seafile, but also self hosted dedicated WebDAV servers like Apache or Nginx.

1. https://emacsconf.org/2019/schedule

As an org-mode user, it looks like a great project. The Youtube video might benefit from editing. The first four minutes don't tell me much about the product, what it does, and why someone should care.

When something is awesome, or just useful, the maker's credentials don't matter very much. For users, the license is mostly irrelevant (philosophical commitments aside). Installation instructions are less important than helping users decide whether the product is worth installing.

Put things in a hierarchy. First tell people what it is and what it can do. Link to download information. On the download page, link to more information about yourself. Make it easy for people to decide not to use it...most people don't use org-mode and that's ok, I guess.

Thank you for the feedback. The video is of a lightning talk for EmacsConf and specifically tailored to this audience.

For a general introduction, I'd choose your way, of course(;

Very cool. Thanks for making this. I'll definitely be installing it.

Just an opinion, but I'd vote adding git as a backend option. I think it's pretty common for people to keep their org-mode files in a catchall repo.

I agree with this, it's the same issue I have with the mobile app I'm using actually for org-mode: orgzly, I ended up syncing manually with the mobile app MGit.

I don't use organice, but I do keep my org files in WebDAV. I use fastmail anyway and I've ended up putting them in the WebDAV provided by them, having tried nextcloud amongst other things. It's a really good solution. My laptop loads the webdav on boot, and my phone app will load from a webdav share as well. I also keep my kdbx files stored like this.

I also use org mode, Fastmail, and I run a NextCloud instance. I'm OK using Fastmail's WebDAV, but I somewhat prefer the self-hosted aspect of NextCloud. Are you able to share any insights about why NextCloud didn't work for you? They might save me some effort!

Sorry for late reply. It was just slow and unreliable. Probably as much down to the machine i ran it on as anything. It was also a while ago. I just found with fastmail it consistently just worked. Also I really need those passwords, and as much as they are backed up I preferred relying on FM than myself.

Tho I'll give this one a try too, I've been using Orgzly a fair bit and am mostly happy: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orgzly

I haven't been able to find much else that supports org mode, except for emacs... which seems ridiculous, as a non-emacs-user. What is it that makes this one of the apparently-most-loved features, but so incredibly poorly supported externally?

I'd assume what makes alternate ports rare is the fact that the entire implementation is in elisp. So any alternate implementation has to start by finding (or implementing) a parser with good compatibility and maintainability.

Orgzly does it well enough for simple cases but if you try to use it for much more than a basic notes/reminder system you’ll run up against limitations fast since a lot of useful behavior like complex date formats leverage the elisp hole to work.

Out of curiosity: have an example? I've only used relatively-simple formats in queries, never in todos, haven't hit any issues yet.

Seems like it'd probably be a parser limitation or something tho? Or are some of the formats lisp-code-like and need to be executed?

Doesn't vim have an org extension?

Vim has a syntax highlighter with little of the functionality that raises Org-mode above, say, markdown.

Not only Elisp is strongly rooted in Emacs-specific capabilities, such that you can't just lift code for e.g. Android apps. But Org-mode also doubles down on using Emacs' text manipulation features while leaking them everywhere, instead of providing an API layer―so additions to Org-mode are actually Emacs text-wrangling scripts with just a few helper functions from Org.

Resolving either of these problems would help, though the first one affects way more than just Org, and I'm not sure to what extent avoiding the second one is possible.

There's a Visual Studio Code extension that supports org-mode. It's what got me into it at the beginning after I tried Orgzly for Android. I now use Spacemacs, btw, which is vim-based key bindings for Emacs, and works really nicely, yet still exposes all that great Lisp stuff too.

Well I'm not happy about Orgzly, but it's the best there is right now

What's wrong with orgzly ?

For those on iOS, I can thoroughly recommend the beorg app for using emacs org mode on the go. It integrates nicely into the OS, offering sync via iCloud Drive (Dropbox and others too, though I don’t use that) and showing notifications for deadlines or scheduled items.

It doesn’t treat org-drill items specially and shows notifications when review is due, which is a mixed bag but not too annoying for me yet.

My only minor gripe with beorg is that on save it loses blank lines between items, which I tend to add in desktop emacs for readability. I believe the author would have to rewrite the app with something like concrete or lossless syntax trees to avoid this.

For those curious, here's a comparison of organice and Beorg: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice/#beorg

Github: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

Web Browser App: https://organice.200ok.ch/sample

This is fantastic. I was just looking at org mode the other day and am planning to start using it. Now with organice, I'll ramp up the effort to adopt orgmode. This is fantastic, snappy and simple. The arrow buttons are a great idea too.

I'm wondering why this looks exactly like https://org-web.org/ Is there some implementation of an org mode front-end that both use?

Wow, yea, that's nearly identical.

Main authors for both repos are the two repo-owners tho, so there's some kind of collab going on in any case: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web/graphs/contributors vs https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice/graphs/contributors (and munen is the CEO of 200ok)

It's a fork of org-web. See the relevant section in the README: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice#acknowledgment

Does the project have a homepage?

If I search for "organice android app" on DDG, it throws back links to organic chemistry apps. If I try it on Google, I get pages about organizing the android's screen.

It does have a homepage: https://organice.200ok.ch/

Hey, this is pretty cool. Just checking it out. It would be nice if you didn't need to request Full Dropbox permission to only a specific folder or something. I think DropBox supports that these days. This way we don't have to give you cart-blanche to everything. Thanks.

Edited: too many spelling and grammar errors at first pass.

Hi taude, OP here.

You're not giving us carte-blance to anything. organice is a front-end only application. You're only connecting your browser to your dropbox. There's no back-end, no data is stored on our account and we don't have analytics.

OK, makes sense, I think? But....

When connecting to DropBox, though, I am prompted from Dropbox with: "organice would like access to the files and folders in your Dropbox. Learn more"

And going to DropBox readme on the topic: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/third-party/t..., it talks about the different access scopes: select access, app folder, full access....

Yes, _your_ Browser Running organice will have full access to your Dropbox. Nobody but you has access to your browser.

I wanted to try the mobile counterpart of the app but I'm not able to find it on F-Droid, do you plan to release it there ?

God.. you guys just love org-mode! Every time I get Polar on hacker news I get another batch of request referencing org-mode. :)

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