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Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

ehneilsen.net

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Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#141

Post by spinchange »

sedachv wrote: post #129
spinchange wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they should , not everyone needs to, or is inclined to learn and live in emacs. Thinking especially of technically inclined folks (or managers, etc) who don't really write code or have any reason to live in an editor, but get benefit from all the loads of other nifty things - just without the cognitive overhead of stuff like tweaking config files, learning all the keybindings, managing buffers and the like- a…

Why do people think that Emacs is impossible for non-programmers to use? "He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a man…

I didn't say it was impossible, just maybe not entirely practical (due to time or inclination, etc)

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#142

Post by juki »

hyperhopper wrote: post #136

My big question with org mode is how to really handle todos. Should I always capture tasks into one big file? When I finish them, do I just leave them for this file to grow forever with more tasks being done and having to hunt for the todos in the file unless I use agenda view?

You can always put different tasks to different files (per project for example).

There no need to hunt for todos; use `C-c \` (or `C-c /` for more options) to create a sparse tree. It supports the same queries as agenda tag searches. For example, `/!` to show all unfinished tasks, or `/TODO` for just the ones with TODO as the keyword.

You can also use the timeline view with a prefix argument to see tasks in the current file (`C-u C-c a L`). Or you can restrict other agenda views to the current buffer (`C-c a < t` for a task list). Custom agenda commands can also specify their own set of agenda files (they can also be chosen by a function whenever the agenda view is created).

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#143

Post by midgetjones »

nemoniac wrote: post #98
dredmorbius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even better Android client for org-mode: 1. Install the Termux app. 2. Install the Termux API app. 3. Install the Termux api CLI tools via apt. You now have access to clipboard. 4. Install Emacs within termux. Termux offers an apt-based package management system, and a substantial, though partial, set of Debian-based packages. (592 packages as I write this -- a full Debian archive is >60k packages now.) There are…

Very cool! Now how do I get Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift? (Joking aside, serious question.)

evil-mode?

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#144

Post by m-j-fox »

nextos wrote: post #4

It's worth noting a great Android client for org-mode has been recently open sourced: http://www.orgzly.com/ https://github.com/orgzly https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.orgzly It was a little annoyance we did not have anything as good as this before.

Too bad orgzly hasn't solved synchronizing. Notepad for Google Drive is a text editor with no features except it gets sync right and has become my favorite way.

Print out your todo list and carry a pen also works well.

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#145

Post by m-j-fox »

sedachv wrote: post #127
alphapapa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the speed? I mean, I use use-package and a bunch of init file optimizations to get Emacs startup time as low as possible, but I can't imagine it being tolerable on my phone. And opening the agenda across my standard set of files would probably be awful.

That is a really funny question. I started using Emacs a relative short time ago on what I still consider a fast machine - 2001 on a dual-processor Pentium Pro at 200MHz with 192MiB of RAM. My phone is one of the lowest-end Android models available today and has a quad-core 1.2 GHz ARM processor and 1GiB of memory. Emacs has not really bloated like other applications over time, it just started out with a lot more fea…

You need spacemacs to help you sop up the spare capacity.

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#146

Post by m-j-fox »

dfrey wrote: post #68
itamarst wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try http://spacemacs.org with Evil mode - vi keybindings, all the power of emacs, and emacs pre-configured to work well out of the box.

spacemacs is all of the power of vim and emacs with all of the complexity of vim and emacs. Having said that, it's what I'm using for writing code now.

Plus it's slow and riddled with bugs and good luck getting a PR accepted. I love it.

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#147

Post by m-j-fox »

rgoddard wrote: post #38
baby wrote: post #15

Every time I try to get into org-mode, I just don't get where to start and how to do things. So I end up going back to Sublime text, creating markdown files to take my notes, works well.

Given the many different features this is not surprising. My approach was to focus on learning one set of features at a time. I used http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html as a guide. The order I went in was: Creating / editing / manipulating trees - Being able to easily organize everything in a hierarchy TODOs - how to customize my own list of TODO states to fit my workflow Habits - I created a habit for learning more a…

Okay but it's too easy to fill a todo list with more than you can accomplish in one lifetime.

I need a guide that tells me how to rationally prioritize work, health and family above my never-ending .emacs.d side project.

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#148

Post by rerx »

BeetleB wrote: post #115
rerx wrote: post #60

I have been a heavy user of Emacs for six years or so. However, I never really got into org-mode. I use it for some simple notes and lists, but I never export them into any different format. If I want to produce a well-formatted PDF, I directly write LaTeX with the help of some very nice Emacs modes. For online documents I feel that some sort of Markdown is often the most practical choice. So far, in my experience th…

> If I want to produce a well-formatted PDF, I directly write LaTeX with the help of some very nice Emacs modes. My experience is quite the opposite. I was a heavy LaTeX user, and stopped pure LaTeX years ago when I learned org mode. For the usual markup, Org mode syntax is much nicer than LaTeX's. And if I want custom LaTeX, Org mode lets me insert it in the document. I never manually write TeX or HTML documents any…

> My experience is quite the opposite. I was a heavy LaTeX user, and stopped pure LaTeX years ago when I learned org mode. For the usual markup, Org mode syntax is much nicer than LaTeX's. And if I want custom LaTeX, Org mode lets me insert it in the document.

That's interesting! I googled a bit and found that people actually write research papers in org-mode.

But in my experience (physics) that usually requires a lot of manual LaTeX control. Also these documents are often written in collaboration with other people, who do not use org-mode.

Frankly, Auctex with Reftex is so nice, I do not see the advantages of org-mode for my main use cases.

Maybe I will give it another try one day for letters and other one-off documents. I could see an advantage in hiding all the LaTeX boilerplate cruft.

> The task management is as simple or as intricate as you like. Org mode doesn't force any intricacies on you. If you want a simple flow, you can get it without learning too much Org Mode.

This is one case where I find actual value in the choices and pleasant design somebody else has made for me. Of course, now that I have learnt how well Wunderlist works for me, I could try to re-implement it in org-mode. But what would I gain? Mainly nicer text editing capabilities, secondly independence from a cloud service. The text editing is not a big deal, since it is actually beneficial to keep these lists short. For now, the cloud service comes with so many advantages that I accept this dependence. Finally, I have come to the surprising realization that browsing and checking off these lists is actually nicer for me in a mouse-first, keyboard-second interface, at least as long as I get to use a keyboard with a trackpoint.

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#149

Post by jamespo »

dredmorbius wrote: post #106
nemoniac wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! Now how do I get Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift? (Joking aside, serious question.)

I have a Bluetooth hardware keyboard with esc, alt, control, and shift keys. No meta. There are programming-oriented software keyboards.

The software keyboards are recommended for all masochists

Re: Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook

#150

Post by throwanem »

chemag wrote: post #124
dangom wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very right that other lightweight markup languages could provide syntax for everything that org-mode does. But what would possibly interpret that syntax? The fact that org-mode is tied to Emacs is both its weakness but also its strength. By sitting on the Emacs interpreter, org-mode imposes no limits to what you can achieve. The synergy with other Emacs packages is enormous. You also forgot to mention one of…

I can see some of the benefits of the integration: emacs can do the horizontal search for TODO entries, create an agenda, let you edit it, and move the changes to the right .org file. Still, I'd argue that the file is the important thing here, not the tool to manage it. I should be able to edit .org files with any other tool (e.g. an android app that eventually modifies a .org file in github), and then do re-process…

> I should be able to edit .org files [...] and then re-process the file.

You can. It's a plain text file; Emacs provides a "live" and highly interactive UI for it, but nothing prevents you editing elsewhere and invoking Emacs, in "batch" (i.e. UI-less pure language interpreter) mode if you like, to evaluate, export, or perform whatever other actions on the file. I do this all the time, albeit in an interactive Emacs, with Editorial on my phone and files synced in Dropbox.

There are also libraries in languages other than elisp which provide some export functionality; notably, Github uses org-ruby, I think it's called, to HTMLify org files for web UI rendering.

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