Comment by tonyarkles
7 months ago
Long time Org-moder, 1-year Obsidian user here.
I love org-mode with all my heart. I used it to run a consulting company for a decade and organize my entire life (reminder to mail my mom a birthday card? Recurring org task. Task breakdown and schedule for clients? Org.) I used it to keep all of my implementation and debugging notes. I’ve used it like Jupyter notebooks with inline code blocks. I’ve written tons of LaTeX math in it.
For what I use it for, Org has a ton of magic sauce that Obsidian doesn’t have for me. But Obsidian has one feature that, sadly, dominates all of that magic: ease of use on iDevices, including offline use.
I can sit and work on Obsidian documents on my iPad+keyboard on an airplane without Internet access. I can reference my documents and update my todo lists from my iPhone without needing to SSH somewhere. The sync service is super smooth and the (much smaller) set of features is enough for most of my daily use.
I miss org-mode very much though and if I were to change jobs and spend less time work-travelling I would probably switch back to it.
One of the biggest reasons that I was comfortable using Obsidian specifically is because the disk format is mostly just Markdown (mod the infinite canvas stuff, which is documented JSON). Being locally-stored Markdown instead of a proprietary format, I feel like there’s a reasonable pathway for me to reimport all of my notes back into Org-mode in the future if I decide to go that way (eg Pandoc)
I dabbled with Plain Org a while back when I was considering switching from iA Writer to Org. It can use iCloud to sync. Have you tried that, and if so, what was your experience like?
I’d really like to use Org but that same limitation kept me from it. If I could at least view Org docs on the run, and do minor editing to jot quick notes, I think I could make the leap.
> If I could at least view Org docs on the run, and do minor editing to jot quick notes, I think I could make the leap.
I just mentioned this in another comment here, but I think you would be interested too. I sync Org mode from the desktop to the mobile, and read in orgzly. To record things on mobile, I use voice notes. I'm right now working on a desktop application to transcribe and make voice notes accessible by other means as well. If you're interested then my Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
I could see something like that. I use Drafts and I’m sure I could wire them together somehow.
iCloud is the problem. I have a Windows laptop, a Linux desktop, an older MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone. Dropbox is the only storage service I pay for (also iCloud and Microsoft’s thing with O365) that will work effectively on all of them. And on iPhone/iPad the Dropbox offline story seems… not great either.
The Obsidian Sync stuff just works flawlessly for me across all of those machines.
I use syncthing to sync my ~/Org directory to my phone and other devices.
Also it is a git repo and I occasionally check everything in and push it to my git server so that it acts as a sort of backup.
There are a few decent Org apps for Android that work with it. I've used Orgzly which is useful for simple notes and todos/agenda stuff. I use it for shopping lists.
However now with Emacs 30.x releases it has a official Android port. I have no idea how good it is. Haven't tried it yet.
My needs are filled with a ultra portable laptop, though.
For me this is a reason to avoid iDevices. I actually have an iPad and had no idea how hobbled these things are before I got one. I'd never consider doing any serious computing on it.
Same here! For me it’s sync, PDF viewing, Mermaid and Excalidraw plugins, and (yes I’m a 35-year Emacs user but…) editing in preview mode.