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Comment by purerandomness | Hacker News Reader

Also, people forget that their favourite SaaS-du-jour probably won't be around after their "Incredible Journey" ends and there won't be a migration path, or it's going to cost too many hours to be worth it.

Emacs will be here for us in the next decades, even well after our career ends, and then some.

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Besides, Org is not complicated. It has lots of features, but at its core it's just a plain text outliner with hyperlinks, keywords and timestamps.

Org is like Common Lisp in many ways. It offers you lots of paradigms to build your own workflows, but you don't need to use or understand them initially.

An it might suffer from the same PR problem Emacs has. Manuals, tutorials and guides throw all features at once without focussing on core concepts first. And it's overwhelming for newcomers.

Would really appreciate links to guides that don't suffer from this.

Sadly, I am not aware of any.

Perhaps some articles and the book in https://www.masteringemacs.org/.

At some point, I would like to write an introduction to Emacs, Org, Notmuch and friends. Their docs are great if you have been using Emacs for a long time. But if you are a newcomer, the learning curve is really steep. And it shouldn't be like that. At their core all these are conceptually simple, easy to understand, and to hack.

Emacs and friends are IMHO really worth investing time into due to the Lindy effect. They will be around when most of the current software is gone. Besides, a text-mode Lisp VM (which is what Emacs is), makes your life as a developer much more enjoyable.

I've tried org-mode a few times, but I just couldn't get over emacs and the mobile app situation.

For now I've settled on Apple Notes which works well with the iPad and pencil across all of my devices. I also use Drafts for longer form writing. The downside is that I'm trapped in Apple's ecosystem, but I'm already deeply there so I might as well embrace it.

There are now several solutions for org-mode on mobile. Organice, beorg, org-web, Orgzly etc.

They are all very nice. I really only need to capture new things on mobile for the most part, so my needs are minimal. What holds me back, however, is not supporting Google Drive for synchronization, as I use that anyway. As is, I would have to use another service like dropbox to sync mobile edits back.

Wait - I see that org-web says it does sync with Google drive, so I will try that out. Seems like I can use it by self hosting and not requiring giving google credentials out to some scary startupm (or large corporate entity I don't want to trust either).

Thanks for the tip!

Organice does support Google Drive, Dropbox and WebDAV. (Organice is a fork of org-web)

More fundamentally, if you (anyone reading) can think of any easily usable way to sync files between devices, I think it might not be too hard to get Organice/etc. to support that as yet another backend.

Syncthing?

Capturing is very simple since it is just plain text. For example here is a guide which uses siri on iOS to capture voice notes to your org-mode inbox: https://orgmode-exocortex.com/2020/04/30/voice-capture-org-m...

There is also a guide for android https://orgmode-exocortex.com/2020/04/28/voice-capture-org-m...

And if needed, we'll migrate to it. Meanwhile, any SaaS-du-jour that actually has data export does the job right now. I'm more interested in moving forward than in noodling on a system that, once it will be completed, will maybe help me make progress on my actual goals.

They also don't give me RSI, which is a welcome change from emacs.

Just remember that, just like you don't actually have a backup until you successfully restore a system from it, the SaaS-du-jour doesn't actually have data export until you use it and import it somewhere, and verify all the data you care about survived the transition.

There's nothing wrong with using alternative solutions, but your critique of Emacs is mostly FUD and a repetition of cliches. Your two points are:

1. Org-mode (or Emacs?) is not completed, by which you imply it is in some kind of premature state that it's not ready to use. like some kind of "version 0.2 beta, use at your own risk". Nothing is further from the truth. Org-mode is currently on stable release 9.3.6. It has been tried and tested for many, many years and is widely used in its niche.

The fact that it is under active development is not a shortcoming, it's a plus. Unless you're arguing by analogy that you cannot use such software as "Chrome" or "TensorFlow" because they have not yet been completed.

2. RSI - I've heard this argument multiple times, and I believe that it actually might affect some people. I, for one, have been using Emacs for well over 20 years and have never had any problems along those lines. But for those who do experience issues, there are multiple solutions around that you might want to give a try. They range from remapping of some central keys to completely different ways of inputting commands, e.g., inspired by vim.

Don't get me wrong, you can user whatever you want. But if these two points are the only reason you shy away from giving org-mode a try, do not worry and don't let them stand in your way.

I mostly refer to the fact that org-mode isn't a complete system - it lacks many integrations. It is, in every article I read, an excuse to faff about with configuring things.

In fact that's pretty much the start of every org mode article - "here's how to change your config file"

(There's nothing wrong with that - I totally enjoy it for some things. I just need a workflow now, not when I've put all the pieces together)

And the "remapping central keys"/"completely different ways of inputting commands" is exactly the faffing about I refer to as well. I know I can customize it to my heart's content. I've done that. I've written way too much elisp. I don't want to any more. I want something that works for me, as out-of-the-box as possible. Many SaaS offerings do.

It's not to say you shouldn't use org mode if it works for you. But I'm not "going to give it a try" if I have a solution that works right now. Nope. Thanks. I have things I'd rather do.

Fair enough, there's nothing wrong using something else if you've found something that works for you. But that is a different statement than what came across from your first post which was worded a bit more negatively, and sounded slightly like bashing (to me anyway).

Also note that my point about the remapping was this: I never had RSI issues with Emacs, so for me it actually works pretty much out of the box. If you experience certain problems, Emacs provides what it takes to adjust it to your specific needs. Can these other SaaS tools do that too?

It's great that not everyone has to use the same tool to get the job done. Variety rules.

I've been using DynaList, so I guess I am vulnerable to this risk. But for some reason I could not figure out a way to make org mode work across all platforms in anyway close to as seamlessly. I was able to sometimes get cross-linking across but it was still pretty clunky. if I wanted to use org mode and I wanted to send random articles and other things to it via share function or send function and a mobile phone or iPad, edited on desktop in emacs, and then search find edit etc from any mobile device, is this really a possibility?

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