Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#1

Post by superbobry » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

Deft is an Emacs mode for quickly browsing, filtering, and editing directories of plain text notes, inspired by Notational Velocity []. It was designed for increased productivity when writing and taking notes by making it fast and simple to find the right file at the right time and by automating many of the usual tasks such as creating new files and saving files.

[] http://notational.net

Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs
jblevins.org

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#2

Post by timsally » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:09 PM UTC

Available via Marmalade as well: http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/deft

Just spent a few minutes playing around with it. I like the simplicity, nice work. One thought I had is that you could enter Deft mode whenever you cd into a directory with a .deft configuration file. This file could have a title for the top of the Deft view and perhaps the ability to specify what columns you want displayed. In this way you can have different directories for notes about different topics.

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#3

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:21 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#4

Post by eschulte » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:23 PM UTC

no org-mode support?

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#5

Post by josephkern » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:28 PM UTC

eschulte wrote: post #4

no org-mode support?

Sure there is.

"You can also customize the major mode that Deft uses to edit files, either through M-x customize-group or by adding something like the following to your .emacs file:

(setq deft-text-mode 'markdown-mode)"

All you need to do is:

(setq deft-text-mode 'org-mode)

Or any other major mode for that matter.

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#6

Post by Rauchg » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:35 PM UTC

If you are a vim user, I recommend vimwiki: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2226

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#7

Post by amjith » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 10:56 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #3

[deleted]

As rauchg mentioned look at vimwiki. http://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#8

Post by Estragon » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 11:06 PM UTC

My notes have gotten pretty extensive and sprawling, so I have a cron job which every hour indexes all org-mode and python files with swish[1]. It's pretty hacky, but I've integrated this with emacs's dired-mode, so that I get a clickable list[2]. It's an absolute life saver, at times.

  [1] http://swish-e.org/docs/swish-search.html
  [2] http://pastebin.com/xeDbjKhA

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#9

Post by honza » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 11:13 PM UTC

Emacs post at the top of HN? Sweet.

Re: Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs

#10

Post by phzbOx » Sat, Sep 10, 2011, 11:29 PM UTC

It's when I see gems like these that I feel like spending time to learn emacs. I've tried a couple of times.. but it is so damn hard. I feel like vim keybindings are burnt in my memory/fingers.. and it makes it so unproductive to relearn something totally different. Any vim power user successfully switched to Emacs? If so, did you switch back missing Vim or you're still using emacs and couldn't be happier? (I'm still interested in the reverse side.. where Emacs power users switched back to vim).