Great app, and I'm happy someone picked it up. I have been using it for a few years after I switched from MobileOrg [1]. Regarding sync and conflict handling, I find using it with git a much better experience, assuming the git client is installed on the phone.
These days, I prefer (fountain) pen and paper, but I still like to throw org-mode syntax across notebooks - it is a no-brainer to retype it or try with some OCR in the future.
I'm using Orgzly on my phone now to take notes. I also have Emacs on my various computers, always open on at least one, though I never got into Org-mode much. Now, I'd like to try having the same notes on all devices.
Synchthing is mentioned often with Orgzly, so I looked into Syncthing. I've been disappointed to find Syncthing drains the phone battery excessively if you enable continuous (event-driven) two-way sync between phone and server.
The problem is Syncthing doesn't hook into the phone's notification delivery service, so it can only pick up changes by keeping a socket open to the server and sending packets often, throughout the day, to keep the socket alive. Even if there are no file changes to report. That drains the battery much faster than, say, a chat app that uses the notification service to send triggers from the server to the phone when there's a new message. (I wrote about technical reasons why that's more battery-efficient here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661294).
Does anyone have a recommendation that will keep notes in Orgzly two-way synchronised with Org files on my server, reliably, without draining the phone battery excessively, and without a long delay for changes on the server to propagate to the phone?
Disclaimer: I'm one of the Orgzly Revived maintainers.
It very much depends on your workflow. Some people may need to use different org files for quickly capturing notes on both phone and desktop while avoiding conflicts. (Luckily, both Orgzly and org-mode has good support for combining content from multiple files.)
But in general, the git repository type (still in beta) allows two way syncing without unnecessary conflicts.
This version also ships and Android Quick Settings tile that will start Syncthing for those X minutes and stop it outside of that schedule, so I'll hit the button as I'm putting on shoes to go out after making a shopping list on my phone or what have you
How does it compare to other note taking apps like Obsidian, Notion, Joplin etc?
I used Joplin for about a year and ended up taking a lot of notes. But after a year it was so full of garbage that I found it increasingly difficult to keep things tagged, clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes. And it ended up looking like my work email inbox.
The catalyst for giving it up was a subtle policy change at work that made me worry about using a personal note taking app with sync to my personal cloud service. I decided to fork my notes into work and personal. Midway through, I just stopped taking long lived notes entirely. I now have one less chore to do.
The same thing happened with my RemMarkable 2. in fact I tired of the RM2 in a much shorter time because it was such a nightmare to sync, search handwritten text etc etc. Pity, because regular note taking apps suck at drawing and diagramming.
Sure, I will forget stuff, but whatever. Most people forget stuff.
Perhaps it's time to revive Joplin and use that Zen-thingemy that was on HN today, the AI tool that gulps your notes and browser history and provides a summariser / searcher? Perhaps that's the only way to take the pain out of note taking apps?
It's an org-mode limited editor, to have org-mode outside Emacs. Compared to MarkDown and "modern note apps" using it it's like a starship (org-mode) against a bike (MD and modern apps), but Orgzly is limited by the OS/input mode of so it's barely usable.
If you want to take notes seriously you need a desktop.
After trying so many kinds of note taking apps. I finally keep coming back one that at max supports Markdown (actually I don't need it, but I can tolerate it) and handles plain text files and give me direct access to those plain text files.
> clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes
I always have a note pinned on top called "Clipboard". Sometimes I name it "Snippets". Earlier I used to call it "Jottings".
It's not "that" kind of note-taking app. It uses OrgMode, vs Markdown, if that helps. Seems to be more oriented to tasks and GTD, in particular.
The limitations, as noted by others, is mostly in the software stack. Without Emacs it's not a full OrgMode client but a mobile helper.
Depends on how you use it. I could barely survive without it nowadays. The reminders and the outlining for projects has become essential.
After trying all the digital options I’m on to a pocket notebook. I carry it instead of a wallet. Great for jotting down that half thought or random todo.
Long running tasks that get rewritten enough times get put in the calendar or a reminder. Anything else that seems important goes in the personal wiki of choice but honestly a lot of the notes are just ephemeral and don’t survive when I switch to a new notebook. And that’s perfectly fine!
I tried that too, but the RM2 was just a larger, more expensive version of that. The problem is that you can't index, search, share, back up etc. I have up after about 10 pages.
That said, my wife bought a hardback diary/planner that has a really nice layout for days/weeks and she uses it every evening.
I really really need a mobile app for org-mode that syncs without pain (yes, I am aware of Orgzly + Syncthing, I am using it, but it still is not as smooth as I want it to be, and has too many annoyances).
I simply cannot imagine leaving the comfort of org-mode for something inferior like markdown, even though there are cool plugins in the Obsidian ecosystem.
Question if you are an Obsidian user - what are your most important plugins?
I use it for obsidian and I had quite a bit of annoyances with it until I started having a node running on a VPS that was always on and set the IP address /domain in the mobile application so that it connects almost instantly. Then it didn't matter what my phone and laptop were doing because they could both always connect to the VPS and syncing happened within a second or so.
is the performance still abysmal? The last time I tried it, a few months ago, you couldn't edit a full page of text without logseq telling you that editing and indexing was disabled for performance reasons. Which is truly bizarre. Sadly didn't work as a replacement for me for that reason.
Same here, I use it for todo lists on my phone and didn't know it wasn't being maintained. Although, maybe that's because i haven't encountered any issues. But my use of it is really minimal, as I prefer typing on a keyboard.
Looking back, a few years ago I used to get Orgzly updates fairly regularly and I remember thinking, "Wow, it's nice to use actively developed software and get all these features I never expected but which are convenient." That hasn't happened in a while, but I also didn't realise it hadn't.
I used orgzly+syncthing for a while but the overhead of manually resolving conflicts between my laptop and phone were not worth it in the end. I'd consider using it again if a sync protocol or some other mechanism of merging changes across multiple computers is added.
The approach I use is to have a single incoming notes file for my phone. I then refile those notes into the correct location on my laptop later. It works for me because I realised that when I want to take a note on my phone I usually don't have time for a complete note, so the extra refile step gives me the opportunity to fill it out more at my leisure on my laptop. As an extra benefit though, it means that I only have one file that can conflict, and I can just bias resolution towards the phone's version.
Same, added an always-on Raspberry pi + zerotier to the mix and got rid of the sync issues between my phone, laptop and workstation all at once.
I wish there was something to make some sort of CRDT for modeling org though. I feel that the operation that ended up causing text conflicts in the past had obvious resolutions with the right structure and Metadata, but yeah, resorting to having a peer always on gets around it more easily that writing my own thing and deviating from emacs and orgzly
Readit News
These days, I prefer (fountain) pen and paper, but I still like to throw org-mode syntax across notebooks - it is a no-brainer to retype it or try with some OCR in the future.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.matburt.mobileorg/
Synchthing is mentioned often with Orgzly, so I looked into Syncthing. I've been disappointed to find Syncthing drains the phone battery excessively if you enable continuous (event-driven) two-way sync between phone and server.
The problem is Syncthing doesn't hook into the phone's notification delivery service, so it can only pick up changes by keeping a socket open to the server and sending packets often, throughout the day, to keep the socket alive. Even if there are no file changes to report. That drains the battery much faster than, say, a chat app that uses the notification service to send triggers from the server to the phone when there's a new message. (I wrote about technical reasons why that's more battery-efficient here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661294).
Does anyone have a recommendation that will keep notes in Orgzly two-way synchronised with Org files on my server, reliably, without draining the phone battery excessively, and without a long delay for changes on the server to propagate to the phone?
Edited to add: In Orgzly Revived go to Settings -> Sync -> Repositories and add https://myfiles.fastmail.com/subfoldername/ (I use "Org")
It very much depends on your workflow. Some people may need to use different org files for quickly capturing notes on both phone and desktop while avoiding conflicts. (Luckily, both Orgzly and org-mode has good support for combining content from multiple files.)
But in general, the git repository type (still in beta) allows two way syncing without unnecessary conflicts.
This version also ships and Android Quick Settings tile that will start Syncthing for those X minutes and stop it outside of that schedule, so I'll hit the button as I'm putting on shoes to go out after making a shopping list on my phone or what have you
You can use more restrictive run conditions, and limit how much time it spends per hour active.
You can also limit it to run only when charging or on specific networks.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
I used Joplin for about a year and ended up taking a lot of notes. But after a year it was so full of garbage that I found it increasingly difficult to keep things tagged, clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes. And it ended up looking like my work email inbox.
The catalyst for giving it up was a subtle policy change at work that made me worry about using a personal note taking app with sync to my personal cloud service. I decided to fork my notes into work and personal. Midway through, I just stopped taking long lived notes entirely. I now have one less chore to do.
The same thing happened with my RemMarkable 2. in fact I tired of the RM2 in a much shorter time because it was such a nightmare to sync, search handwritten text etc etc. Pity, because regular note taking apps suck at drawing and diagramming.
Sure, I will forget stuff, but whatever. Most people forget stuff.
Perhaps it's time to revive Joplin and use that Zen-thingemy that was on HN today, the AI tool that gulps your notes and browser history and provides a summariser / searcher? Perhaps that's the only way to take the pain out of note taking apps?
If you want to take notes seriously you need a desktop.
Emacs on android and a keyboard also lets you take notes seriously.
> clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes
I always have a note pinned on top called "Clipboard". Sometimes I name it "Snippets". Earlier I used to call it "Jottings".
Long running tasks that get rewritten enough times get put in the calendar or a reminder. Anything else that seems important goes in the personal wiki of choice but honestly a lot of the notes are just ephemeral and don’t survive when I switch to a new notebook. And that’s perfectly fine!
That said, my wife bought a hardback diary/planner that has a really nice layout for days/weeks and she uses it every evening.
I simply cannot imagine leaving the comfort of org-mode for something inferior like markdown, even though there are cool plugins in the Obsidian ecosystem.
Question if you are an Obsidian user - what are your most important plugins?
[0] https://github.com/amake/orgro/
[1] https://orgro.org/faq/
I use it for obsidian and I had quite a bit of annoyances with it until I started having a node running on a VPS that was always on and set the IP address /domain in the mobile application so that it connects almost instantly. Then it didn't matter what my phone and laptop were doing because they could both always connect to the VPS and syncing happened within a second or so.
- enable save/sync on resume orgzly
- ensure inotify based sync enabled on orgzly folder
- enable polling every minute on syncthing folder
- sync files by most recently modified
[0] https://github.com/amake/orgro/
I wish there was something to make some sort of CRDT for modeling org though. I feel that the operation that ended up causing text conflicts in the past had obvious resolutions with the right structure and Metadata, but yeah, resorting to having a peer always on gets around it more easily that writing my own thing and deviating from emacs and orgzly
Internet disappearances have become more and more common since COVID times. Honestly scares me
https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
[0]: https://linmob.net/using-the-pinephone-pro-daily-despite-hav...