Org-mode file format support

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Posted by Alex
Oct 21, 2019 at 03:01 PM

I’ve been looking for an Android<>Windows outliner/organizer solution. Found a nice outliner called Orgzly [http://www.orgzly.com/]. I really like its feature set. It uses .org format for storing the data. What’s stopping me, however, is that to use org-mode on the Windows side I’m expected to use Emacs. But I don’t want to use that bloated monster app (the installer is over 100Mb), and I like my graphical user interfaces. So, maybe anyone knows any Windows native outliners that can work with .org files?

Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 21, 2019 at 06:11 PM

There is an org-mode plugin for the increasingly popular VS Code editor. Last time I checked, it didn’t support folding though, which is probably a big deal if you’re looking to use it as an outliner, but might not be a deal-breaker if you just want to view org-mode files.

That being said, most of the appeal of org-mode isn’t related to the file format, but instead to all the associated functionality, for which you’d really only get a small taste outside of Emacs. Full-blown org-mode is closer to a really elaborate PIM/information organizer that just happens to store everything as plain text, as opposed to a plain text document file format like Markdown.

Posted by washere
Oct 21, 2019 at 06:38 PM

Orgzly is my favorite Android “Todo” Outliner. I don’t see why people pay monthly subscriptions to someone running a small company hosting their data via apps if it involves new ideas (academic, book writing or patents Potential, new ideas etc) or sensitive (company data etc). When they can read it all at the very least. Or worse share/sell it if there’s a tiny clause in the small prints. Of course shopping lists etc don’t matter, if you don’t mind behavior tracking for marketers profiling you.

Orgzly has themes including black, free, open source hence safe, private, nice design and features and I set it up to sync to sd card (backup) + cloud (my free Dropbox account).

You can open an issue below and request a specific file format, opml would be best for outliners tree:

https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly-android/issues

Orgzly is totally free and one of the few top Android apps with no ads or pesterware or data mining tracking etc:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orgzly&hl=en

You might use the format specifying options to create a format that pulls into Excel. Then can export as database or whatever. Needs a bit of work. Tree levels will need specifying indents. The maybe use bonsai or Treepad or tkoutliner etc to pull in as tree. But I’d do the below:

Re: Android <> Windows:

However for serious Outliner work on Android I use Notecase Pro and specially Halna Pro. Halna OPML-2 export (I specified the format of and got last year from him kindly), imports nicely into Notecase Pro on Windows Mac & Linux. All nice devs too plus free versions.

You can set black or whatever themes for Halna in Android phone/tablet/Chromebook and Notecase Pro on laptops too, to save battery and the eyes. These are the best so far IMHO and won’t be matched for many years to come.

Posted by Alex
Oct 21, 2019 at 07:06 PM

I love Halna Outliner! I think it’s the best pure outliner on Android: great customizable UI, 2-pane view. I’ve been using it for some time. The thing is, now I’m looking for something with a little bit more features (better search, inter-linking, to-dos with reminders, tags), and Orgzly seem to fit the bill nicely. But, alas, don’ts see a user-friendly (2-pane outliner) counterpart to sync to on Windows.

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