Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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?

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 ?

Doesn't vim have an org extension?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com