Neorg: Neovim 0.5’s answer to modern life organization

by bpierre • 5 years ago

212 72 5 years ago

nynx• 5 years ago

This is neat! I wonder if this kind of functionality would be accessible through a language server, so multiple text editors could use it.

CA0DA3• 5 years ago

I'm not very familiar with VIM - could someone explain what this is? Seems like some settings to make NeoVIM into a note-taking app?

cercatrova• 5 years ago

org mode in emacs is a very popular note-taking tool. This seeks to emulate and refine it for (neo)vim.

CA0DA3• 5 years ago

Thanks!

bloopernova2• 5 years ago

vim is the "VIsual editor iMproved", which is an upgrade to the "VIsual editor". It works by having a text entry "mode" and a separate text manipulation mode. This is very powerful, but does take some getting used to.

For example, let's say you want to delete 5 lines: In visual studio code, you'd either select all the text and hit backspace, or maybe hold ctrl+backspace to delete whole words at a time. In vim, you'd hit escape to exit "insert" mode, then position your cursor at the beginning of the 5 lines to be deleted, and type "5dd" which means "delete a whole line, 5 times".

In the hands of an experienced vim user, it can make amazing edits to text in fractions of a second. It's really cool! It also works in a terminal, so it's available to you when you SSH to a remote server, for instance.

Org-mode is kind of like Markdown, in that it's a way for plain text to have structure. Something like this:

    * Birthday Party Plan
    ** INPROGRESS [#A] Buy cake
       Ask Jen about her baker friend's availability
    ** TODO [#B] Buy beverages
       Talk to Mike about his party and what people drank
    ** INPROGRESS [#A] Send invitations
       <DEADLINE 2021-08-10>
    *** DONE Design invites
    *** TODO Get Addresses
    *** TODO Mail merge
    *** TODO Print invites

Lots of stuff going on there! I'm tracking the state of each made up todo item. I've got a priority on the main todo items, and a deadline for one of them.

Org is note taking, scheduling, structured text, even running programs and scripts inside your notes and saving the results in the note itself. From orgmode.org: "Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming and more — in a fast and effective plain text system."

So, all of that is being supported by NeoVIM now :)

I hope that helped, let me know if there's anything you want clarified or expanded.

crubier8• 5 years ago

To remove 5 lines in VSCode I would just type cmd-backspace 5 times. Don’t even have to count the number of lines beforehand. Just delete lines until it looks as you wanted. Much simpler than the complex process you describe, that involves counting lines and moving the cursor to the exact correct position.

As always, I am unimpressed by “vim tricks” that vim people always boast about. And I am yet to see a single real use case where vim is faster than good old basic keyboard shortcuts (that includes cmd-d)

CA0DA3• 5 years ago

thnks!

slightwinder3• 5 years ago

Looks like another iteration of someones personal markup-flavor, aimed at task-managment for self-organization. Basically, a todo-list in text-form.

But I don't see anything worthful yet which makes this flavor preferable over org-mode or markdown. Seems to be also still very in progress. So give it some more years to grow I would say.

zelphirkalt4• 5 years ago

Markdown and Org are not in the same league. However, the goal is to have something like Org in (Neo)Vim. It will take a while, if it ever happens to get to feature parity with Org though.

Edit: I would welcome though, if Org was supported well in (Neo)Vim. Then there would be one less excuse not to use it.

_benj• 5 years ago

In my opinion is the creation of an actual alternative to emacs, but more modern and simpler using lua instead of (e)lisp.

I have nothing against emacs but being a fan of vim and of simpler systems I'm a fan of what I'm seeing being done with NeoVIM!

dimal• 5 years ago

It feels like the promise of neovim is finally being realized. So much good stuff in 0.5, and now we're seeing cool things being made with the lua integration. It's gone beyond just being a more maintainable fork. It's starting to really feel like the next generation of vim. Very exciting.

e12e• 5 years ago

Looks interesting, but I'm a bit sceptical - feel a bit likes it's features before use-cases - ie: many features, that may or may not be useful, but mmaybe not a few good use-cases?

I've simply changed my notes.txt to notes.md - and that handles most of what I need for ideas, To-do lists and such.

oezi• 5 years ago

Yes, I agree. The command vocabulary needs to come first for it to make sense and be a sensible application which is different from just a text editor.

I have recently developed my own terminal-based UI for day journalling and todo/task tracking [1] in markdown files because I was sick of rearranging todos in other tools and just needed something which provides a standard template for each day (journal, high priority, todos of the day).

The main advantage is that you can "migrate" all unfinished todos to a new page/day and thus get a clean start each day. This idea comes from bullet journalling.

Long term I would like to add generated views (for instance: last year this time one of your highlights was...) and support recurring tasks to be inserted into the daily log.

[1] https://github.com/coezbek/rodo

Stack: Ruby, Curses, Markdown

zelphirkalt4• 5 years ago

Hm looks like an interesting approach, to let the user configure what symbols to use for what kind of markup. However, using a bunch of regexes reminds me of painful regex writing for Atom, Sublime and GEdit (or was it Geany?) syntax highlighting. It was never really easy to make it work correctly, without disregarding some edge cases. For most users it will probably mean to use a popular config and that's it.

EDIT: From the readme:

Let's be real here, org and markdown have several flaws - ambiguity (tons of it), ugly syntax and the requirement for complex parsers.

Aside from the fact, that I do not think org has ugly syntax, I think an actual parser is way better than having to rely on putting everything into regexes. It makes the code easier to maintain.

p00f• 5 years ago

However, using a bunch of regexes reminds me of painful regex writing

I searched "regex" in the repo, the only places it appears are in the code (as comments) and in the parser spec

bluenose69• 5 years ago

I have no doubt that this is a useful project, but I sure wish this webpage used words instead of animated images to explain things, especially because the images are taller than the browser size on my laptop (unless I shrink to the point where the letters are too small to read.

The setup steps are also really quite unclear. What content do we insert, and in what file? Just a few more words of clarification on this would be appreciated.

PS. I agree with the contention that neorg, when more completely coded and described, could encourage users to switch from vim to neovim. Another contender (which, for me, is more convincing) is telescope.

parafactual2• 5 years ago

It would be nice if the default keybindings were listed somewhere in the wiki. Did I miss them?

bryceneal• 5 years ago

This seems promising. Some things I would like to see:

1. Deft-like interface for viewing and searching norg files.

2. Perhaps as part of the above, a way to create a new note which is automatically saved with a file name or prefix (i.e. The current date or timestamp).

3. Project-wide todos / agenda view. Perhaps this could be based around dirman's workspace concept.

It seems the author has gone through some trouble to make the project easy to extend, and the documentation looks quite good for such a young project, however from the commit history and PRs it looks like it's maintained largely by a single developer so far. I don't see any links in the README to modules that have been built by the community yet.

I will be keeping an eye on this one. I'm really excited about NeoVIM's future and all of the interesting projects that could be built using LuaJIT.

shakow2• 5 years ago

The pain... it won't stop. After so much oppression from other text editors, it's time we fight back.
Woah, keybinds that actually make sense. Some text editors should take notes.

Am I being overly sensitive tonight, or is it a bit out of taste for a landing page? It's great that they are re-implementing org-mode and I'm all for a bit of friendly banter, but that sounds surprisingly bitter to me.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Welcome to the editor wars, my friend. Shit has been flung far and wide for nearly 50 years now.

maccam94• 5 years ago

The author commented on this on Reddit, they're going to fix that text soon:

https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/oi6z11/neorg_a_road...

shakow2• 5 years ago

Great, I'm glad to see it was indeed friendly banter.

vimacs2• 5 years ago

A shame because I personally found it funny and completely non-offensive as an Emacs user. This weird fake editor war is part of the culture of both editors and I'd prefer this kind of banter to the boring and tired jokes of "it's a great operating system that just lacks a decent text editor".

root_axis2• 5 years ago

Does someone know which plugin creates the style of buffer tab that appears in the gifs on this page?

knubie• 5 years ago

Barbar perhaps?

https://github.com/romgrk/barbar.nvim

root_axis2• 5 years ago

Doesn't look quite the same, but this looks cool too! Thanks!

folkrav• 5 years ago

I think it's nvim-bufferline https://github.com/akinsho/nvim-bufferline.lua

Normille• 5 years ago

Looks like vim-airline to me:

https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline

konart• 5 years ago

Quite a few plugins for a bufferline out there, but as it was mentioned - looks like a https://github.com/akinsho/nvim-bufferline.lua with default settings.

_qbjt2• 5 years ago

I'm interested to check this out but for me simplicity is more important than features when it comes to note taking software in general. I've tried apps like Notion, Evernote, etc. but I always find myself going back to Simplenote; it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of those other apps but it works well for my use case of quickly writing some text and having access to it across all platforms. When it comes to Vim, I get a ton of use out of vimwiki [0] with Markdown syntax. It may not be as powerful as Org-mode (or Neorg in this case) but it's had the most "stickiness" out of any comparable plugin I've tried.

[0] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

stewbrew• 5 years ago

What's the advantage of vimwiki w/ markdown over just markdown + gf (or a lean hyperlink plugin)?

_qbjt2• 5 years ago

Vimwiki has some basic keyboard shortcuts for editing and navigating between pages in your wiki. It also has a couple of neat features, like the ability to export your entire wiki as HTML documents using a single command. But you could accomplish all of this with some basic configuration changes so I wouldn't call any of those "advantages". To be honest, I don't remember why I started using vimwiki as it was years ago but for whatever reason it has stuck with me.

yewenjie• 5 years ago

It is very hard to beat the extensibility of Lisp though. Like what is the equivalent of defadvice in Lua?

_pmf_• 5 years ago

I thought NeoVim would fix the "dozens of different package managers" problem, but apparently not.

Protostome• 5 years ago

I have been using vim (and recently - nvim) daily for almost 15 years for development and general text editing. I'm certainly a big fan.

However, I couldn't really find any set of configurations that surpasses simple todolist applications like todoist/etc.

Sure, If you want to spend your days tinkering and hacking the app that's super cool. But most of us want a todo-list app that just works.

Ability to send notifications to the OS/phone would be nice

Calendar sync would also be nice

Per-project tasks is cool too

But that's mostly it. I couldn't understand from the wiki of that project how can I do those things. Those are the most important issues to address, way before an elaborate discussion on modularity and customization.

Show the simple functionality first.

chrisMyzel• 5 years ago

Cool! The reason I sticked with org-mode was org-roam which changed my usage from a single document to a whole zettelkasten system and I love it. Any plans on linked documents?

elflaune• 5 years ago

The true power of orgmode lies in its embedded source blocks. I have dozens of little codeblocks inside my orgmode files that aggregate data for me. I also have a a collection of scripts inside org for various tasks, neatly sitting in a todo tree.Babel src blocks are a true game-changer.

What language does neovim/neorg use for scripting? As much as i like orgmode, i'm still not very fond on scripting LISP.

carlosgj94• 5 years ago

Lua

jgb1984• 5 years ago

How is this different from vim + vimwiki which exists for ages and is very stable and mature? I don't like this "must rewrite everything in Lua" obsession that neovim has started. The neovim plugin landscape is now riddled with rewrites of vim plugins, often multiple attempts of the same thing, but usually with half the features and more bugs.

Can't say I'm happy with the split that neovim has brought in the vim community, the incompatibly between the two is increasing sharply.

jmiskovic• 5 years ago

I wish installation instructions were more clear. Neorg depends on plenary and packer, and they also don't have clear installation instructions.

I followed steps as well as I could, :CheckHealth doesn't show any plugin problems, but .norg files don't show syntax or any advertised features. Being complete Neovim noob, I don't know how much time I'd have to spend in Neovim ecosystem to understand how to make it work?

nahuel0x• 5 years ago

Seems good, but I think Neovim as a platform lacks a couple of features to make this competitive against Emacs org-mode, in particular inline images and proportional fonts.

Neorg: Neovim 0.5’s answer to modern life organization

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