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kaorahi / howm

note-taking tool on Emacs
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Guide to use org files as default in howm #17

Open bitic opened 4 hours ago

bitic commented 4 hours ago

Hi,

Working with howm, I miss org-mode's formatting. I would like to know what the advantages and caveats are of using org files in howm and what would be the best way to configure it. I couldn't find any good guide. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks,

artsi0m commented 3 hours ago

You could choose from two options:

  1. Configure howm to always use org mode with use-package: Look at Quick start in the README of this repo for a guidance.

  2. Use my function howm-insert-prop-line which could interactively add # -*- mode: Org; -*- or any other major mode prop-line to your howm note.

artsi0m commented 3 hours ago

two options

Well, there might be more of course, because it is emacs. As always...

jabirali commented 8 minutes ago

Working with howm, I miss org-mode's formatting. I would like to know what the advantages and caveats are of using org files in howm and what would be the best way to configure it.

Org-mode and Howm are not entirely orthogonal. For instance, Org agenda and Howm menu both provide some kind of task management system, but the TODO syntax used to build those overviews are different. Moreover, both provide a few different ways to link between files. However, most of Org-mode and Howm are complementary in my opinion. You can e.g. mix Org-mode links and Howm links in the same file if you want, and nothing bad happens. You could put Org and Howm tasks in the same file, and they would show up in the Org agenda and Howm menu respectively, without any real conflict. It would however be quite redundant to use overlapping features in both systems, so it's perhaps not a good strategy except for temporary backwards compatibility while migrating systems.

More importantly, they offer quite different features, which combine nicely if you use "Howm with Org-mode". As you mentioned, Org-mode offers various formatting options. In addition there's the famous outlining, ergonomic typing of equations (via org-cdlatex-mode), pretty preview of equations (e.g. org-toggle-pretty-entities), images (if you use the GUI), powerful export (org-export-dispatch), nice table support, and so on. As a long-time Vim user, I wouldn't be using Emacs today if it wasn't for Org-mode – for programming alone I prefer Vim, and for e.g. LaTeX I consider it a tie.

On the other hand, as you probably know, Howm provides a simple and efficient way to link notes together and search through them. In my config, that's more a replacement for systems like Org Roam that builds some kind of personal wiki system on top of a directory of Org-mode files. At least for me, letting Org handle all markup and export, and letting Howm handle nearly all file linking, has been a pretty sensible split. (I don't currently use either for task management, I've got a pen-and-paper bullet journal for that.)

I couldn't find any good guide.

I agree with @artsi0m, the quickstart is the best place to start. It lists how to change the Howm file extension and heading format to be Org-compatible, which is really the main configuration that is really needed. If something important is missing in the quickstart suggestion, then that is perhaps something that should be added there :)

The main Org-related addition I have in my own Howm config is to use :hook (org-mode . howm-mode) in the use-package block so that if I open an Org-mode file without going via Howm (e.g. via recentf), then Howm links should still work.