oh dear another victim falls to the church of emacs…

Anyway…

Be prepared to invest at least 3 months to do all the research (i.e find working code snippets online) and tweak to your likings. This is assuming you dont know elisp. If you do then it will be faster. Think now with AI, you can write these codes even faster

Org mode is the best. It is just a text file when open with other text editor: very lightweight and very easy for version control. The magic happens when you are in emacs, you can:

1. Create a list of task and subtask and susubtask. This is easy

2. Create a fully working latex document with all the stuffs required like the include packages. You can then compile that latex and view WiTHIN emacs. You can even configure so code on left, pdf on right and a keystroke will compile and refresh the pdf .

3. The notes are not only text notes. You can create programming notes. So something like this, excuse my wrong syntax it has been a while:

• Your header with text

** your subheader with text

*** your subsubheader, instead of text, you now have a code block. It looks like this, again syntax maybe wrong

#+begin_python

print(“Hello”)

#+end_python

AND you can run that code above and have it output to WITHIN emacs. But that is not all, you can have the codeblocks communicate with each other:

Say you have a block A that does some computations and generate a vector. Say it is complex calculations and you need the block in C++ for speed.

Then you have block B which is a Python block that uses Matplotlib to plot. You can feed result of A into B so B can plot.

4. Last but not least, you can CREATE A BASIC TABLE LIKE EXCEL AND HAVE IT DOES THE CALCULATIONS ON ROWS/COLUMNS. sorry caps… this feature blows my mind everytime. So in a text file, you can very quickly create

|--dates----|-----Spending---|

| Monday | 40 |

| Tuesday| 100 |

emacs can format the table very nicely and very quicky. Much nicer than I have above, 100%.

Then, you can tell it to sort, add, subtract, multiply or whatever to the table. You can swap rows, swap columns with just a keystroke.

If you want to go even further, you can create an Agenda table where one of the columns is a due date. Then I believe you can schedule the tasks and sync them with Google Calendar. So your phone gets the reminders too… There is an app on Android that allows you to edit the Org mode file directly too…

FUCK now I need to get back to emacs. Havent used it for months but this post shows up. I blame you (jk).

org-mode

C-u C-u C-c C-x C-l my beloved

Why would you want to use a 20+ year old Mac for notes?

Emacs. Not even once. 🚫

i just have a file called “notes” in my home directory, which i edit via nvim

I went the ohterway with Emacs -> Logseq -> Obsidian, but with several things in between. Emacs isn’t for me, I did give it a red hot go and coded off it for a good year or two about 10-15 years ago.

HOWEVER, I have to agree. Emac’s Orgmode is first class and I’ve never been as satisfied with a task app since. However, at the time I was using it, mobile support was pretty much nonexistent, and I was missing vim too much, so I eventually abandoned it.

Now i just use a selfhosted instance of memos, which is sparse on its feature set, but works well for me.

Once you discover org mode… you’re not going back.

I love infinite nested tasks; subtasks, sub subtasks, subsubsubtasks, subsubsubsubaubtasks.

See check this. You start by creating 3 main points… then you need to give more info to these 3 points, and you can either insert tons of text under it… or create subtasks. Now you figure the subtasks need explanation, again either text or subtasks. Lovely

Emacs is a great operating system just a shame it doesn’t have a good code editor.

Vim was my primary tool of development for over a decade, and I used Obsidian for about 3 years. However, in early 2024, I tried out Emacs and never looked back.

I find it functionally equivalent to Vim albeit perceivably slower, and Org-mode (+Denote) is far superior than Markdown and Obsidian with its slew of plugins.

Migrating my 3 years worth of notes was a pain since I was using Obsidian’s variant of Markdown syntax to link other notes. In the end I gave up trying to convert those notes, and used them alongside my new Org-mode notes, thanks to Denote’s interoperability.

In fact, Denote’s naming philosophy is so powerful yet simple that I started using it for all documents and downloads.

Great. The next logical step in this evolution is going back to pen and paper, lol

It’s Nano or nothing for me

Did you replicate the daily journal workflow of logseq in org mode or did you end up with something different?

Todoist works great and I don’t need to learn a whole operating system to use it. Plus, it works on my phone!

Emacs for everything…

/jk I mean everything text.