I love Emacs. It’s my daily driver IDE and I use it for everything involving text. That said, I can’t help it: I love shiny UIs, instant cloud syncing, and top-notch mobile apps. Plain Org, beorg, and Logseq make decent apps for reading content on the go, but they’re completely different from Emacs for editing and writing new content when I’m on my iPad. I have to learn at least two different apps for accessing the same data, and their feature sets aren’t identical in any case.
If I could run Emacs natively on my iPad, I’d be all-in on org-mode. But I can’t, so I’m not.
I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn
Developing a PWA for it (basically bikeshedding) is much more painful than learning Emacs. Right now, any vim user can jump into emacs with very little friction -- Doom Emacs comes fully configured with evil-mode ootb, and is easily customizable.
I think the reason for the glut of personal kb apps is the relatively high interest of most "tech" people in these things. Unfortunately, most people bow out of their systems very often -- they either don't handle enough data or they give up on old data (or have it ineffectively categorized).
This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there. There's some trying to use GPT-3, but honestly, I don't want my apps parsed by an internet-slurry model. When (if, really) it gets good enough, one wouldn't need to take notes in the first place.
This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there
That take is just... wild.
I've been following this space intently for two decades. The past couple years have seen revolutionary, fantastical advances. Obsidian 1.0 like just came out in September of this year! A huge milestone, but with Logseq chasing them and seeming only a months behind them (and more open source to boot).
Even the slow, web-bound proprietary dinosaurs they are replacing — Notion, Roam, etc — are only a few years old, and in their time (which is now over) those represented huge advances over clunky Evernote, OneNote, and their ilk.
All building on the shoulders of ancient, more limited tools like nvAlt, VoodooPad, Tiddlywiki, etc etc etc.
We're right on the cusp of having a bunch of choices that can help manage all your notes, including your own and your collections of other people's, with images and video and audio and PDF etc, storing it all in non-proprietary open formats, on your own infrastructure (if you want, or cloud if you prefer), with familiar and easy GUI clients for all your devices, that stay synchronized whether you prefer to pay to make that easy or prefer to leverage the open standards and do it all yourself... and we're just getting started with the potential integrations and do-it-yourself add-ons that are enabled by the basis in common/open standards.
I think has been and continues to be one of the most interesting spaces in all of computing. (Sure GPT-3 and friends are interesting, but emerging solutions in this space are also useful, and to a huge number of people to boot.)
Currently I am prototyping a web-based, collaborative approach which provides basic building blocks and allows the end-user to create and modify their own application in realtime as they use it through a plugin system, using a simple and configurable input/output system to configure data flow between plugins/panes/components.
My hypothesis is that a more modular approach is the next emergent layer of productivity. A collaborative workflow synced between multiple devices and users in realtime, with an in-app repository for new components and workflow layouts. Think foobar2k but for productivity. Google Apps on crack, where users can modify the application itself in realtime in addition to context.
The problem with other solutions is they solve one thing really well and then rely on a plugin system to fill the gaps. I'd rather see what an approach where each component does something simple but is a greater part of a larger, bespoke workflow. bash-utils for GUI-oriented, networked productivity. Currently, we have to rely on non-realtime, multi-application workflows with rigid, non-transparent data pipelines. Creating a cohesive workflow requires significant specialization, while also locking you in to a specific, non-malleable workflow dictated by app developers.
This isn't a new field -- there have been people who have now closed shop for longer than they were ever active. It's just the influx of a large number of interested people online that have discovered digital tech that's pushing people to make more of these interfaces. None of these organizational structures are inventive or the end-all -- they all use the same methods to store and organize data, the only difference is how well they reduce the friction required for data entry. There's nothing these systems do that couldn't have been replicated 20, 30 years ago. Really, they hardly ever move past the paper paradigm.
GPT-3 et al are a different thing though, and I reckon when they're good enough to be frictionless, the majority of people will stop taking notes altogether. The popularity of this field is solely based on how long it takes for people at OpenAI and others (Stability) to drive down costs to deliver ~1M words/mo to the average customer.
These will all go the way of the phonebook. There'll be "look how my model tears your markdown notes" contests.
None of these organizational structures are inventive or the end-all
Sure, but that isn't the important thing. The organizational structures and theories/philosophies are already mainly "good enough".
The important thing is making that power available in a useful form.
It's the software around them that has never been good enough — not even for just entering the images/data/notes/ideas. And you can't derive any value later from data that wasn't entered in the first place.
nothing these systems do that couldn't have been replicated 20, 30 years ago
Hard disagree. One of my important use cases is: "paste PNG/JPEG image data from the clipboard, and instantly display it where pasted — while, behind the scenes converting that to an image file on disk and the (open) standard markup to make this data compatible with 1000s of other tools — and sync all of that to all other devices within a few hundred milliseconds"
You couldn't do that even 5 years ago. With any tool, AFAIK. (And I was looking.)
It's about the software, not the organizational structures.
It is revolutionary in precisely the same way as having good cameras in smartphones is. Many, many people take 1000x more photos today than they did in 2002 — and with good reason! It's super easy. And it's now easy — as opposed to basically impossible — to make use of them later. Can't remember where you bought that thingamajing? Just search for the snapshot of the receipt you took 4 years ago on your phone.
This generation of tools is bringing this kind of organizational power to people who have never had it before — not because they technically could't have used the older, more cumbersome, slower, less capable system — but just because they don't need it badly enough to make the investment of doing that.
Making it easier — lower friction to adopt, easier to derive the benefits from — is almost the entire point.
The organizational structures and theories/philosophies are already mainly "good enough".
They're mediocre at best
I don't have an opinion on collaboration, because collaborating without proper organization is like running away from the problem. With proper organization, collaboration is easy.
I think saying Notion's dead because we have Logseq now is like saying MS Word is dead because we have vim - ignoring timelines and I'm exaggerating a bit of course.
I’m doing the same thing I complain about the “emacs is enough, we’ve had this for 30 years” commenters doing... conflating “good enough for me and my nerd friends” with “good enough for anybody” :-P
What I meant was that we finally have cheap/free GUI tools to do the same things, based on open standards with no data lock in.
From that standpoint, proprietary closed systems where your data is trapped, like Notion and Roam, should go extinct.
BUT it is definitely arguable that Notion is still easier and more approachable than Obsidian, and certainly LogSeq.
From that standpoint Notion is still a better tool for a large number of people.
This take fundamentally ignores the web-based aspects of this project, as well as its attention to a lower-common-denominator modern UX that works intuitively, without surprise, confusion or a barrier to entry.
The first few hours can determine if someone sticks with something or not. Emacs might best benefit the power user, but normal users need simple products too.
I'm not sure how ability to learn Emacs and ability to construct a good knowledge base are more than weakly correlated.
I know dozens of people who use Emacs and dozens of people who have well-organized knowledge bases and while a few people have both that's about what I might expect based on random chance.
Some people might want to help their grandmother organize themselves better as they age, why do they need to learn a DSL and ecosystem instead of just downloading an intuitive app with modern UX sensibilities?
I did emacs org-mode for over a year and ended up abandoning it. For me, the issue was: I could absolutely see how powerful it could get, but not only was the learning curve wildly steep -- the way it does things is so different from most other programs that it would slow me down in those.
I ended up falling back to a mix of things like zim-wiki, xbindkeys and a bunch of zenity/fzf based shell scripts to get what I wanted, while having something that played nice with everything else, interface wise.
I see you, and I don’t think you’re wrong, but I DO think that pursuing what Org does outside the world of emacs is worth doing.
Asking someone to fiddle with lisp in order to have org’s functionality is a LOT. I feel like WAY more people would benefit from org if they didn’t have to use emacs to do it.
Exactly my thought. What I need though is a web front end to search and view my org files when I don't have emacs available to me. I have client laptops that will only let me access browser apps.
A web front-end is overkill -- Emacs users can use any completion framework (ivy, icomplete, vertico) with fdfind / ripgrep to get extremely powerful instantaneous search.
Plus, there's no way any org features other than the baseline few are supported.
Can't speak to that because I don't understand this use-case, but AFAIK it should be possible to modify an org agenda as long as emacs is running somewhere. It could write the current agenda to a file (in a s3 bucket, for example) with the function org-agenda-write, and the application on a phone could read the agenda and "push" the changes back, and an elisp function could handle modifying the actual agenda.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted on the mailing lists as a POC or something.
Also one thing i like about these alternate options is they work on my phone. I regularly use Obsidian on my phone to lookup information, jot things down, etc.
With that said i'm still looking (making.. maybe?) my perfect solution which is mostly just Selfhosted + Notes + Spaced Rep in the right UX.
I do not get your question: org-mode offer various ZK-alike implementation like zetteldesk on top of org-roam, in mere storage terms a zettel is a heading, real links between them allow to travel between notes. You can capture them in a timeline...
I get that emacs and org-mode work for you, and probably a lot more people here on this website than elsewhere.
And if that works for you, great!
But, I'd wager that Silver Bullet (or Obsidian, Logseq, etc) is a far better tool for 95% of people (for the purpose of organizing ones class notes, book reviews, recipes, first drafts of articles/papers, self-directed learning, personal notes of meetings, diaries and journals, etm).
Cross-platform (including phone) is probably a must-have for many. Immediate ease of use and lack of time spent not only learning, but configuring, is also important. A GUI following normal-people expected conventions, likewise.
The overwhelming majority of people aren't programmers, and will never use emacs for anything. What emacs is good at is not what they need.
It is interesting that there are so many products that replicate Emacs features for people who don't use Emacs. ("X without Emacs" seems to be the open-source version of "Uber for Y".)
It makes me think that if Emacs had a mode that was usable by novices out of the box and retained the same power it would take over the world.
There is no 100% spec compatible org-mode application for the mobile phones (because org mode does not have formal spec AFAIK). No amount of features will compensate that single drawback. End of story.
Comments
Every time I explore one of these my final impression is essentially trying to re-invent org-mode without emacs.
I understand that emacs is a big ask for someone to learn, but so far none of them can offer a similar experience out of the box.
I love Emacs. It’s my daily driver IDE and I use it for everything involving text. That said, I can’t help it: I love shiny UIs, instant cloud syncing, and top-notch mobile apps. Plain Org, beorg, and Logseq make decent apps for reading content on the go, but they’re completely different from Emacs for editing and writing new content when I’m on my iPad. I have to learn at least two different apps for accessing the same data, and their feature sets aren’t identical in any case.
If I could run Emacs natively on my iPad, I’d be all-in on org-mode. But I can’t, so I’m not.
Developing a PWA for it (basically bikeshedding) is much more painful than learning Emacs. Right now, any vim user can jump into emacs with very little friction -- Doom Emacs comes fully configured with evil-mode ootb, and is easily customizable.
I think the reason for the glut of personal kb apps is the relatively high interest of most "tech" people in these things. Unfortunately, most people bow out of their systems very often -- they either don't handle enough data or they give up on old data (or have it ineffectively categorized).
This app (aka "this week's personal knowledge manager") is the same as every other one out there. There's some trying to use GPT-3, but honestly, I don't want my apps parsed by an internet-slurry model. When (if, really) it gets good enough, one wouldn't need to take notes in the first place.
That take is just... wild.
I've been following this space intently for two decades. The past couple years have seen revolutionary, fantastical advances. Obsidian 1.0 like just came out in September of this year! A huge milestone, but with Logseq chasing them and seeming only a months behind them (and more open source to boot).
Even the slow, web-bound proprietary dinosaurs they are replacing — Notion, Roam, etc — are only a few years old, and in their time (which is now over) those represented huge advances over clunky Evernote, OneNote, and their ilk.
All building on the shoulders of ancient, more limited tools like nvAlt, VoodooPad, Tiddlywiki, etc etc etc.
We're right on the cusp of having a bunch of choices that can help manage all your notes, including your own and your collections of other people's, with images and video and audio and PDF etc, storing it all in non-proprietary open formats, on your own infrastructure (if you want, or cloud if you prefer), with familiar and easy GUI clients for all your devices, that stay synchronized whether you prefer to pay to make that easy or prefer to leverage the open standards and do it all yourself... and we're just getting started with the potential integrations and do-it-yourself add-ons that are enabled by the basis in common/open standards.
I think has been and continues to be one of the most interesting spaces in all of computing. (Sure GPT-3 and friends are interesting, but emerging solutions in this space are also useful, and to a huge number of people to boot.)
Currently I am prototyping a web-based, collaborative approach which provides basic building blocks and allows the end-user to create and modify their own application in realtime as they use it through a plugin system, using a simple and configurable input/output system to configure data flow between plugins/panes/components.
My hypothesis is that a more modular approach is the next emergent layer of productivity. A collaborative workflow synced between multiple devices and users in realtime, with an in-app repository for new components and workflow layouts. Think foobar2k but for productivity. Google Apps on crack, where users can modify the application itself in realtime in addition to context.
The problem with other solutions is they solve one thing really well and then rely on a plugin system to fill the gaps. I'd rather see what an approach where each component does something simple but is a greater part of a larger, bespoke workflow. bash-utils for GUI-oriented, networked productivity. Currently, we have to rely on non-realtime, multi-application workflows with rigid, non-transparent data pipelines. Creating a cohesive workflow requires significant specialization, while also locking you in to a specific, non-malleable workflow dictated by app developers.
Hoping it turns out to be a useful paradigm.
This isn't a new field -- there have been people who have now closed shop for longer than they were ever active. It's just the influx of a large number of interested people online that have discovered digital tech that's pushing people to make more of these interfaces. None of these organizational structures are inventive or the end-all -- they all use the same methods to store and organize data, the only difference is how well they reduce the friction required for data entry. There's nothing these systems do that couldn't have been replicated 20, 30 years ago. Really, they hardly ever move past the paper paradigm.
GPT-3 et al are a different thing though, and I reckon when they're good enough to be frictionless, the majority of people will stop taking notes altogether. The popularity of this field is solely based on how long it takes for people at OpenAI and others (Stability) to drive down costs to deliver ~1M words/mo to the average customer.
These will all go the way of the phonebook. There'll be "look how my model tears your markdown notes" contests.
Sure, but that isn't the important thing. The organizational structures and theories/philosophies are already mainly "good enough".
The important thing is making that power available in a useful form.
It's the software around them that has never been good enough — not even for just entering the images/data/notes/ideas. And you can't derive any value later from data that wasn't entered in the first place.
Hard disagree. One of my important use cases is: "paste PNG/JPEG image data from the clipboard, and instantly display it where pasted — while, behind the scenes converting that to an image file on disk and the (open) standard markup to make this data compatible with 1000s of other tools — and sync all of that to all other devices within a few hundred milliseconds"
You couldn't do that even 5 years ago. With any tool, AFAIK. (And I was looking.)
It's about the software, not the organizational structures.
It is revolutionary in precisely the same way as having good cameras in smartphones is. Many, many people take 1000x more photos today than they did in 2002 — and with good reason! It's super easy. And it's now easy — as opposed to basically impossible — to make use of them later. Can't remember where you bought that thingamajing? Just search for the snapshot of the receipt you took 4 years ago on your phone.
This generation of tools is bringing this kind of organizational power to people who have never had it before — not because they technically could't have used the older, more cumbersome, slower, less capable system — but just because they don't need it badly enough to make the investment of doing that.
Making it easier — lower friction to adopt, easier to derive the benefits from — is almost the entire point.
They're mediocre at best
I don't have an opinion on collaboration, because collaborating without proper organization is like running away from the problem. With proper organization, collaboration is easy.
I think saying Notion's dead because we have Logseq now is like saying MS Word is dead because we have vim - ignoring timelines and I'm exaggerating a bit of course.
Yeah, you are right actually.
I’m doing the same thing I complain about the “emacs is enough, we’ve had this for 30 years” commenters doing... conflating “good enough for me and my nerd friends” with “good enough for anybody” :-P
What I meant was that we finally have cheap/free GUI tools to do the same things, based on open standards with no data lock in.
From that standpoint, proprietary closed systems where your data is trapped, like Notion and Roam, should go extinct.
BUT it is definitely arguable that Notion is still easier and more approachable than Obsidian, and certainly LogSeq.
From that standpoint Notion is still a better tool for a large number of people.
This take fundamentally ignores the web-based aspects of this project, as well as its attention to a lower-common-denominator modern UX that works intuitively, without surprise, confusion or a barrier to entry.
Eh the intuitiveness is useful for the first few hours. Almost all "modern" PKM systems are web-based.
The first few hours can determine if someone sticks with something or not. Emacs might best benefit the power user, but normal users need simple products too.
I don't care about that. If they can't learn a (non-"simple") system then they won't have a good knowledge base anyway.
I'm not sure how ability to learn Emacs and ability to construct a good knowledge base are more than weakly correlated.
I know dozens of people who use Emacs and dozens of people who have well-organized knowledge bases and while a few people have both that's about what I might expect based on random chance.
Some people might want to help their grandmother organize themselves better as they age, why do they need to learn a DSL and ecosystem instead of just downloading an intuitive app with modern UX sensibilities?
Is that offensive to you?
lol. no.
The reason for the glut of these apps is that people have a drive to create.
It's a very damning thing to say, you know, if all that information management systems lead to is more information management systems.
Just for sake of another person's experience:
I did emacs org-mode for over a year and ended up abandoning it. For me, the issue was: I could absolutely see how powerful it could get, but not only was the learning curve wildly steep -- the way it does things is so different from most other programs that it would slow me down in those.
I ended up falling back to a mix of things like zim-wiki, xbindkeys and a bunch of zenity/fzf based shell scripts to get what I wanted, while having something that played nice with everything else, interface wise.
I see you, and I don’t think you’re wrong, but I DO think that pursuing what Org does outside the world of emacs is worth doing.
Asking someone to fiddle with lisp in order to have org’s functionality is a LOT. I feel like WAY more people would benefit from org if they didn’t have to use emacs to do it.
I'd absolutely love to see more of this. Hate emacs but after picking up orgzly I'm addicted to orgmode.
Exactly my thought. What I need though is a web front end to search and view my org files when I don't have emacs available to me. I have client laptops that will only let me access browser apps.
A web front-end is overkill -- Emacs users can use any completion framework (ivy, icomplete, vertico) with fdfind / ripgrep to get extremely powerful instantaneous search.
Plus, there's no way any org features other than the baseline few are supported.
I think the problem many users are looking for is a way to access emacs org mode and TODO entries on the phone.
Can't speak to that because I don't understand this use-case, but AFAIK it should be possible to modify an org agenda as long as emacs is running somewhere. It could write the current agenda to a file (in a s3 bucket, for example) with the function org-agenda-write, and the application on a phone could read the agenda and "push" the changes back, and an elisp function could handle modifying the actual agenda.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted on the mailing lists as a POC or something.
Do you mean something like this?
https://github.com/Gopiandcode/emacs-viewer
Oh, that's pretty similar.
How does Org Mode handle Zettlekasten?
Also one thing i like about these alternate options is they work on my phone. I regularly use Obsidian on my phone to lookup information, jot things down, etc.
With that said i'm still looking (making.. maybe?) my perfect solution which is mostly just Selfhosted + Notes + Spaced Rep in the right UX.
I do not get your question: org-mode offer various ZK-alike implementation like zetteldesk on top of org-roam, in mere storage terms a zettel is a heading, real links between them allow to travel between notes. You can capture them in a timeline...
I get that emacs and org-mode work for you, and probably a lot more people here on this website than elsewhere.
And if that works for you, great!
But, I'd wager that Silver Bullet (or Obsidian, Logseq, etc) is a far better tool for 95% of people (for the purpose of organizing ones class notes, book reviews, recipes, first drafts of articles/papers, self-directed learning, personal notes of meetings, diaries and journals, etm).
Cross-platform (including phone) is probably a must-have for many. Immediate ease of use and lack of time spent not only learning, but configuring, is also important. A GUI following normal-people expected conventions, likewise.
The overwhelming majority of people aren't programmers, and will never use emacs for anything. What emacs is good at is not what they need.
It is interesting that there are so many products that replicate Emacs features for people who don't use Emacs. ("X without Emacs" seems to be the open-source version of "Uber for Y".)
It makes me think that if Emacs had a mode that was usable by novices out of the box and retained the same power it would take over the world.
IMHO if your "OOB" defn includes popular plugins w their default configs, Obsidian is at least comparable on features, and more accessible.
But then I can add popular emacs packages and my custom functions and get WAY ahead.
I use a very basic emacs config. Emacs, org-roam, evil, evil-org, ivy, and which key. The most common way I do stuff is still M-x org-roam-find-node.
The only time investment was learning the readline keybinds and doing the emacs tutorial.
I do most of my coding in jetbrains with vim keys, and emacs is just a personal knowledge manager for me
There is no 100% spec compatible org-mode application for the mobile phones (because org mode does not have formal spec AFAIK). No amount of features will compensate that single drawback. End of story.
It does have a spec now. It is called orgdown or so.