Irreal

As I’ve written many times, I use Org mode to organize a ridiculous percentage of my life and can’t imagine living without it. It’s just so powerful that I keep finding new uses for it. The problem is, though, it’s so big and powerful that it’s hard for a n00b to get started. Experienced Org users always give the same advice: don’t try to learn it all at once; learn and use some small part of it first and then move on to another aspect of Org. Rinse and repeat.

Eric MacAdie has a slightly more refined version of that advice. As he says, “Learn X to accomplish $SOME-IMPORTANT-TASK” is much easier than just “Learn X”. This being tax season here in the U.S., he suggests learning how to use Org lists to track the receipt of tax forms.

That’s exactly how I learned Org. I started by making a check list of the W2s and 1099s that I expected to get and checked them off as they came in. When the list was complete, I could move on to the next stage of preparing my return. But that was just the first step. Later, I started tracking my tax info all year long. I had an Org table for each class of expense and added each tax deductible item to it as I went along. Each row of the table also had a link to the receipt for the item so they’re easily accessed in case of an audit. Of course, being Org tables, I also had a running total automatically. In one case, only a portion of an expense was deductible and Org could take care of that calculation automatically as well.

Finally, I had a summary table that gathered the totals from each of the tables. That table is completely populated automatically by Org as well. At the end of the year, I simply export the required tables to PDF and send them and the W2/1099 documents to my accountant. It’s still not pleasant—tax time never is—but it’s a lot easier than it used to be.

If you’re looking for a task to apply Org to and you live in a jurisdiction like the U.S. with a completely irrational and dysfunctional filing system, tracking your tax data is a good place to start.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has been doing more writing lately and has felt the need for a thesaurus. I very seldom use a thesaurus for reasons that I’ve written about previously but it’s sometimes convenient to have one. My typical use case is to avoid reusing the same word too often in close proximity. A thesaurus is good in that situation because I’m just interested in finding an alternative word, not shades of meaning.

Borkowski is trying to decide between two thesauruses, le-thesaurus and mw-thesaurus. Le-thesaurus provides a simple list of synonyms from which you can choose and it will automatically replace the word at point. Mw-thesaurus presents a nicely formatted buffer that gives synonyms and information about shades of meaning. It’s much more comprehensive than le-thesaurus but doesn’t automatically replace the word at point.

I have two thesauruses installed: mw-thesaurus and power thesaurus. Power thesaurus operates much like le-thesaurus but uses a community sourced thesaurus. I almost always use power thesaurus because it best fits my default use case and because when I want shades of meaning and context I turn to Websters 1913, most recently through the newly built-in dictionary-search.

Another problem with mw-thesaurus that I didn’t know about until I read Borkowski’s post is that it globally sets org-hide-emphasis-markers to t, which hides all Org emphasis markers in all buffers. That’s not something I want, and I’ve occasionally noticed it happening in the past but I didn’t know why. Borkowski solved that by editing the source code but perhaps there’s a better way.

Regardless of which one(s) you install, it’s often handy to have a thesaurus available without having to leave the comfort of Emacs. Any of those discussed here are fine and there are doubtless other good ones.

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by those who use Emacs for projects that don’t involve science or engineering. One such aspect that I always enjoy reading about is using Emacs for creative writing, by which I mean novels, short stories, poetry, and the like.

That may seem like an edge case but there are plenty of writers who write their novels with Emacs, including such A-list writers as Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson. There’s little reason to wonder why. Emacs has superb editing and linking capabilities that makes writing and organizing a piece of prose easier than it would be with most other writing platforms.

John Urquhart Ferguson is another writer who uses Emacs and he’s written a package, Org Novelist, to make the note taking and story organization easier. A full-blown novel can have several minor characters and locales that are hard for the author to keep track of. Similarly, ideas may occur to the author that don’t involve whatever part of the story is currently being worked on and a way of capturing those notes is needed. Ferguson’s package is intended to help with that. Best of all, the package let’s you write your prose in Org mode.

Ferguson has a short announcement on reddit but to really get a feeling for what the package is about and what it can do, take a look at the README on his GitHub repository. The package is not on MELPA or any of the other package repositories so you’ll have to download it from GitHub.

Ferguson stresses that the package was written for his own use with his particular workflow but he’s releasing it in case others find it useful. From the README, that seems likely to me so if you’re interested in a package to help you with your creative writing, take a look.