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I use Org Mode for personal logging/journalling

by kkleindev on 2/27/22, 8:50 PM with 48 comments

  • by rayiner on 2/28/22, 3:51 PM

    Org Mode is amazing! As an attorney I spend a lot of my time taking notes, tracking moving parts, and working with voluminous PDFs. I've tried a lot of different tools over the years (OneNote, etc.) for this purpose, but they all have serious shortcomings. I used to use Emacs in my previous life as a programmer, but had never used Org Mode before. I've got the following workflow:

    - Org Mode (with org-superstar) for taking notes. Everything gets saved into a Microsoft OneDrive for sync between my laptop and desktop machine.

    - Org tasks and org-agenda for project planning. Far less disruptive to your train of thought than busting out Microsoft Planner to remind yourself to follow-up on some line of research or whatever.

    - pdf-tools for viewing PDFs. It's a bit kludgy (it renders PDF pages to PNGs on the fly because that's what Emacs can display), but it's somehow still less CPU-intensive than Acrobat DC or anything based on PDF.js. PDF-tools has fast incremental search, and a fast occurs mode for finding and highlighting all hits in the file.

    - pdfgrep and pdfgrep-mode for searching across PDFs. Hits show up in a grep-mode buffer and you can click to jump to the exact hit. (It uses libpoppler under the hood to confine the search to the PDF text layer and show hits in logical page order rather than PDF file order, which can be arbitrary.)

    - org-pdftools for creating links to specific pages of specific PDFs in Org Notes (e.g. noting that the testimony for a particular witness starts on page 758 of some 2,000-page trial transcript).

    - Built-in Emacs features (windows, frames, buffers) make it easy to juggle between documents and compare them side-by-side. Emacs Bookmarks make it easy to save your place and jump back to where you left off. It's shocking how many notes tools get this wrong and only let you see one document or attachment at a time.

    I'm kicking myself for not having discovered this earlier!

  • by xenodium on 2/28/22, 8:24 AM

    Interesting to see habits tracked using an org property drawer. I hadn't considered this before. Org itself has habit-tracking support https://orgmode.org/manual/Tracking-your-habits.html using :STYLE: habit.

    I'm head-in org land. For habit-tracking, I found removing friction from the tracking process itself absolutely fundmental for longer term success (Atomic Habits, the book, corroborates). Like the author, I also needed mobile access for this. I built https://flathabits.com (powered by org) for this purpose (iOS only). In the end, I found I hardly used Emacs org mode to view or track my habits since the mobile app removed all the trakcing friction. Now I just get peace of mind knowing that I can access the plain text file if I want to.

    ps. I also built another org mode app for iOS https://plainorg.com

  • by nonrandomstring on 2/28/22, 2:27 PM

    There's a school of throught, prevalent at the last Emacs conference (See Karl Voit's talk), that Org is also a notation/markup. So-called "org-down" has been put forward with foundational semantics, headings, lists, emphasis and other basics.

    https://karl-voit.at/2021/11/27/orgdown/

    I'd actually love to see Gemini and HN adopt orgdown. Just sayin... :)

  • by Rochus on 2/28/22, 11:01 AM

    Org Mode tries to be an outliner. Outliners are the right tool for the job from my experience (> 30 years) since you can create and use context to reduce redundancy and makes it easier to find and to understand things again retrospectively. I had a look at Org Mode many years ago when switching from Windows to a Linux laptop which meant that I needed an alternative for Ecco Pro. But I quickly reached the limits with Org Mode and a few other tools and finally developed my own tool, which has proven itself over more than a decade in daily use in large, complex projects. A few years ago I released it as open source: https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline

  • by mschaef on 2/28/22, 11:28 AM

    I've been using org mode to maintain a personal work log for around ten years.

    General structure is a file per month, a toplevel outline heading per day, and a global hotkey that takes me to 'today' with a single button. I use a private git repository to archive it to a secure place and replicate across different machines if needed. (Not common.)

    Code here:

    https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d/blob/master/lisp/orglog....

    It's worked well, but generally speaking the key to logging is less the code/system and much more the discipline to write every day. I'm hit or miss on that front, but still find it useful to both formalize my thoughts on things into english and also occasionally go back to look at previous things I've done. (Oh, and it makes developing lists of accomplishments for annual reviews an easy thing.)

  • by j7ake on 2/28/22, 8:41 AM

    I did a lot of time logging for orgmode. It was great if ones task are all done on a single computer.

    I found trying to synchronise across devices tedious and made me stop logging.

  • by sva_ on 2/28/22, 10:42 AM

    I tried using Org and Org-Roam for a while, but I think I gave up on it. The overhead of constantly updating and fiddling to make your config comply with the updates didn't seem worth it. The alternative would be to just stay on an old version, but that goes against my principles of running a rolling release distribution. And hell, if you decided to update after a year or two, you could probably start over with most of your configuration, rather than trying to understand the updates.

  • by TacticalCoder on 2/28/22, 3:25 PM

    I'm a huge Emacs user but I totally suck at org-mode. Now I do use it but mostly for the outlining functionality: I love it that I can quickly collapse/expand by "x levels" (for example only level 1 titles, up to level 2 titles, etc.). But most of all I "search don't sort": it's very common that I "ripgrep" (from Emacs of course) inside my .org files. Even only using like that, without knowing much about it, it's still very useful.

    I do version everything under Git so when I switch machines/countries my latest notes are one (ma)git command away.

  • by BeetleB on 2/28/22, 5:09 PM

    > I wrote a script to apply that template to every week and month of the year. Hence $ ls ~/org/weeks/ returns the following:

    You don't need this - you can use Org's capture templates with datetree type. It will then have it all in one file with appropriate headings.

    Tip I didn't realize for years: Sometimes you forget to log it on the day intended (e.g. for the post-month you log it 5 days after the new month when you should have done it on the 1st day). Prefix your capture command with C-1, and it will prompt you for the date to file it as.

  • by drcongo on 2/28/22, 9:42 AM

    Interesting to see as an entire submission rather than just every other comment.