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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.

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I've started using org-mode couple of years ago, and write documents using the basic features like headers and formatting, links between docs, and code sections, but still haven't figured out which power features are the ones worth investing time into, and would be the most useful. Which further features would you recommend digging into, based on your experience?

I suspect this is an issue for most org-mode users, we all use different things.

I have two real uses for org-mode; I write a "work log", or "diary", every day I'm at work which keeps track of meetings, tickets/issues I work on, pull-requests I review, etc.

Unrelated to that I have a property I rent out, and I keep a table for each year showing rent-received from my tenant. I have a little "database" of previous tenants, and their details.

When I add a new table row for this year, say "January 2026 | Sharon | €1000", that updates the global profit/loss table for the document as well as profit/loss for the current year AND a t able which just lists the tenants I've known, how much they paid, and how many months they rented for.

Both of these two use-cases use very different things. The diary is just a text-block as template, the financial stuff uses multiple tables, custom elisp code, and some summing operations.

I consider myself little above basics even after all this time. The features I use depend on what I'm doing at the time, and so I take a JIT approach to learning org-mode. I'd say just keep the main resources close by as they're very detailed, and search them whenever you're thinking of doing X thing.

A lot of the features in org simply aren't adding a ton of utility, IMHO.

If you need to represent tabular data, possibly with rudimentary calucations, in plain text then it's great.

For anything more complex it's best to just reach for Excel.

How do you handle PDFs, images, HTML/rich text snippets? Asking because Evernote supported all of those. It’s what keeps me using that app, even though I cringe every time I open it.

https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download is handy for images (org-mode shows images just fine).

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/copy-as-org-mode/ lets you copy formatted text from web pages to org-mode format

pdf's – do you mean downloading them? I mean, emacs can view pdf's, your computer can store them as files, making a clickable link to ./sicp.pdf from org-mode is just [[./sicp.pdf]] (or, while you're reading the pdf or browsing it in dired, hit your key for org-store-link and then in org-mode hit the key for org-insert-link).

OP here... I do all of these from Emacs orgmode, and more.

Ref. a presentation I did last year: https://github.com/adityaathalye/slideware/

- The org plaintext: `clojure-web-app-workshop-functional-conf-2025.org` (see the raw source for formatting directives and structure.)

- Live coding presentation delivered straight from my org source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHVEId-utY

- The RevealJS handout presentation compiled directly from the same source (self-hosted, with images, text snippets, quotes, code snippets): https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

- The extended blog post for the same (I start off all presentations as longform thinking in org plaintext): https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

- I can also do LaTeX PDF and raw tex, for undergrad student "professor points" :D (See examples in the github repo --- the "n Ways to FizzBuzz in Clojure" presentation. Which also was a live coding demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTouODWov-A ... "demo live, or die trying", I say :D)

And... I mentioned my site... This is the build step, no Emacs needed :)

  __shite_templating_compile_source_to_html() {
      # If content has front matter metadata, it is presumed to be in a format
      # that the content compiler can safely process and elide or ignore.
      local file_type=${1:?"Fail. We expect file type of content like html, org, md etc."}
  
      case ${file_type} in
          html )
              cat -
              ;;
          md )
              pandoc -f markdown -t html
              ;;
          org )
              pandoc -f org -t html
              ;;
      esac
  }

you can show images in org. https://orgmode.org/manual/Images.html

with webpages I just store the link, but maybe you want to download them? I've used singlefile extension to download and store copies and link from org.

with pdf I just store evince /path.pdf & and triple click to select and middle click in a terminal.

I've never used anything but plain text in org TBH. I know there are tools out there that make it possible/easy to work with certain binary files, but I've just never had such a use case. At most I'll put a link to a given file that opens it in a native viewer.

>some files going over 15MB in size

Word count ~3 million? (~60 novels worth!)

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