After watching and writing about Protesilaos Stavrou’s video on searching and replacing in Emacs, I went back and watched his previous video on Org mode basics. Although I’m late to the party with this post, the video is interesting enough that I felt it was worth writing about.
Although Prot mostly restricts himself to Org mode markup, he does his usual comprehensive coverage of the material. He starts with explaining the emphasis markers (bold, italics, etc.) and gives an excellent explanation of the difference between verbatum and code. Although these both render the same in every export format I know of, it’s perfectly reasonable that some new exporter could render them differently.
Most of the rest of the video considers optimal ways of entering text in an Org buffer. He starts with headings and shows how to add additional headers at the same or lower levels, mark them as TODO items, and how to promote and demote a heading’s level. One of the most interesting things that I learned about was org-indent-mode. It provides a virtual display of an Org buffer in which headings, subheadings, lists, sublists, and other constructs are indented according to their level. The underlying file is unchanged so the exporters don’t get confused by manually added indentation. Although Prot doesn’t mention it, you can make the mode persist by adding indent to the #+STARTUP keyword in the header.
As with all of Prot’s videos, this one is well worth your time. You’ll probably learn a thing or two even if you’re already familiar with Org markup. The video is 48 and a half minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time but it’s worth it.
