At Space Bar Labs, we prioritize workflows that stay out of our way. GitHub Issues/Projects and other heavy web-based project management tools have their place, but Org Mode offers a lightweight, plain-text alternative that is quite a powerful task management system. I came from OmniFocus on the Mac and iPhone quite some time ago. I’m using Ubuntu and Android now. I’ve tried many similar apps to fill the OmniFocus void in my life. Org Mode has a lot to offer for someone who wants more than a simple task list. I’ll leave the why and how to other guides.

I’m still learning Org Mode. I came across Org Mode Compact Guide today and was surprised there wasn’t a simple EPUB to download for offline use and for an eReader.

Converting the Guide to EPUB

Just want the file? Here you go:

👉 Download the Org Mode Compact Guide (EPUB) 📗

Build It Yourself

If the above file is out of date, you can create it yourself.

# Clone the official Org Mode repository
git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs/org-mode.git
cd org-mode/doc

# Install Pandoc
sudo apt install pandoc

# Convert the .org source to .epub
pandoc org-guide.org -o org-guide.epub --metadata title="Org Mode Compact Guide"

The Ecosystem: Vim & Mobile

While Org Mode originated in Emacs, you don’t need to switch to Emacs to manage Org-based tasks. The ecosystem includes Vim and Android (among others):

Vim

  • vim-orgmode: The classic plugin for original Vim.
  • nvim-orgmode: A high-performance Lua implementation for Neovim. Honestly, I don’t use this because it became a mess of dependencies, but I may return to it someday. I hear it has some powerful features

Android

  • Orgzly Revived: An Android outliner that handles .org files natively. I use it with Git Annex through Termux. I don’t currently understand why it introduces a new “Notebook” concept instead of reading/writing from the filesystem directly. This is the cause of syncing failures that I’ve experienced. The sync settings have to be set to write to the filesystem frequently to mitigate that. That said, it’s well made otherwise. I’m not aware of another plaintext organizer on Android with the same amount of polish.

If you’re using Org Mode for a Getting Things Done (GTD) workflow, these titles might be helpful. They sort on Android and Linux. (And, I might add that it’s hard to get meaningful emoji to sort!) The emojis are especially nice on Android.

==> 0_inbox.org <==
#+TITLE: ⬇️ Inbox

==> 1_active.org <==
#+TITLE: 📖 Active

==> 2_deferred.org <==
#+TITLE: 📗 Deferred

==> 3_someday.org <==
#+TITLE: 📘 Someday

==> 4_maybe.org <==
#+TITLE: 📙 Maybe

==> 5_archive.org <==
#+TITLE: 📚 Archive

(Though I have to admit, it is a bit strange to see archive.org given the file extension.)

Conclusion

When GitHub Issues/Projects, Jira, etc are too heavy and you want the flexibility of text editing tools, plaintext productivity can be a powerful alternative. It also makes it possible to do anything you imagine with an LLM because your data is already in a well known plaintext format. I’m looking forward to what I discover with this workflow!

Bonus

If you like the idea of plaintext productivity and need to do accounting, try Beancount!