Anyone here uses Org-mode for PKM? I’m planning on moving to it from Obsidian, primarily due to Org-babel and the fact that it’s open source, and would like to know what your setups and workflows are like with it (plus points if you’re a student because I am too)
I am a daily user of org-mode with org-roam, and the org-agenda.
I also read my emails in emacs, so I can directly link to emails in my notes.
Another org-mode user here. No longer in studying in a formal environment, but eternally a student.
Learning Emacs was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I could never fully commit to my knowledgebase when I knew my data was in a proprietary format. Moving to Emacs was not only an earth shattering upgrade over the proprietary tools I’d been using, but it gave me confidence to really put my soul into creating a distributed cognition system that will grow with me into the future.
I’m not quite at django’s level of using Emacs for email, but it’s definitely on the list. I do use Emacs for my task management using GTD which I wouldn’t have been able to do without Rainer König’s excellent course.
I personally use the following packages: pdf-tools - view, editing and link to pdf documents helm-recoll - fulltext search across my entire knowledgebase from within emacs, including pdf search org-transclusion - inline display of linked content from other locations in org-files (still integrating with my workflow)
I make liberal use of org-refile, org-store-link and org-insert-link. In order to keep the cross linking robust, I’ve added the following to my dotfile
(setq org-id-link-to-org-use-id t) (setq org-id-track-globally t)The learning curve is steep, but once the basics have been learned, the power is really unmatched.
I do use org mode for PKM, it’s great. Used org roam for two years, but I wasn’t really using all of its features so I went over to using denote which works well for me. I am not a student, however, I do read scientific papers and articles for my work and I am mostly using org noter and citar for annotations/syncing and bibliography management. Sometimes I simply take the note without any extra fuss also. I recently stumbled upon youtube sub extractor which let’s me get a transcript of a youtube video as text in emacs. Great stuff. This is of course only scratching the surface as far as workflows go. Hope it helps, if onøy a little!
I use org-mode constantly. I keep a log of what I’m doing each day. I use org-babel quite frequently. I use org-roam for most capturing and finding most notes. If I need to dig deeply I usually use ripgrep. I use mu4e for email in Emacs.
I have a post that I nudge along describing how I use org-mode currently. https://cmdln.org/2023/03/25/how-i-org-in-2023/
I’ve been using different tools through out my studies. Pretty much settled into Emacs now though. It’s been amazing and there still so much left to customize.
Right now I’m pretty much just using org roam, org noter and all the regular org features. You can honestly just use org by itself and you’ll be fine. There are so many useful features packed into it which all integrate extremely well.
For my personal workflow I’ve kept it relatively simple
- one file per course
- one file for TODOs
- create files for topics once they become to big (org roam has some useful functions for this)
- if I don’t have a place for some information I usually create a new file but you could also work with daily notes
The one thing I definitely do differently to other systems I’ve used is that I don’t shy away from massive files. Org mode does an amazing job structuring them and allowing you to narrow in on the important bits such that the benefits easily outweigh the drawbacks and Emacs has no problem working with these either.
