Irreal

Recently, James Gill tweeted about a collection of Emacs resources for writers that he’s curated into a GitHub repository. There are two parts to the collection:

1. Tips and examples for writing with Emacs, and
2. Writing a book with Emacs.

As you’d expect, most of the articles are about leveraging Org-mode for writing. That’s no surprise, of course, because Org excels at that. Indeed, almost any type of writing from memos or blog posts—such as Irreal’s—to journal articles or books is easily accomplished with Org. I’ve reached the point were virtually everything I write is done with Org-mode.

Sadly, the literary writing market runs on Word so if that’s your niche, you’re going to have to deal with conversion. Org, of course, has built in tools for that and if those don’t meet your needs, the excellent Pandoc almost certainly will.

If you’re a writer who’d like to escape from the pain that is Word and give Emacs a try, be sure to read the articles in Gill’s list. I’ve discussed several of them in Irreal previously but a few are new to me. A handful of the resources are videos but most are short blog posts or articles that are easy and quick to read.

It’s not always obvious how to use Emacs for writing effectively so the articles and videos collected by Gill, which distill a lot of hard won wisdom, can be a real help.

Karl Voit has an interesting post in which he explores ways of defining projects in Org-mode. Note that by “project” Voit doesn’t mean the type of object handled by an app such as Projectile, but a set of tasks meant to achieve a common goal. If you’re like me, the answer seems obvious: add a project tag to the header defining the project.

Of course, things aren’t that simple, especially for someone like Voit who on the one hand has exacting standards for how things should appear in, say, his agenda but on the other hand wants very fluid Org files. By “fluid” I mean that projects aren’t necessarily top level items or even second level items. They can appear anywhere in the tree. I’m inclined to be more rigid in my Org file layout so I avoid some of the problems that Voit has.

Voit discusses several possibilities along with their pros and cons. I’ll let you read his post to see what solution he finally settled on. If you’re trying to impose a project structure on top of Org, it’s definitely worth taking a look at his discussion.

I’m an inveterate data collector and recorder. I keep records of everything to the point that my wife was making fun of me last week when I used my phone to recall a piece of obscure information that I’d stored away. If you’re like me, there are two problems to solve: capturing and retrieval.

First you have to have an efficient way of capturing information. For me, that’s mostly Org-mode although I do use the Apple Notes app too. I have keyboard shortcuts on my computer that take me directly to an Org-mode capture buffer so I can capture events or ideas as frictionlessly as possible even if I’m not in Emacs when I want to capture the data.

My searching strategies are not particularly sophisticated. I mainly search by tags or by using counsel-rg, an Ivy/Counsel interface to ripgrep. Using them, I can retrieve almost any piece of my information quickly and easily. Some folks, however, are more demanding.

Over at beepb00p, Karlicoss has a long and interesting post on how he searches his personal data. Like me, he uses tag searches and ripgrep but his system is much more comprehensive and he has several scripts that extract data from things like reddit, his twitter feed, and basically anywhere he comments or adds data. The extracted data is usually imported into Org for easy handling but he has other strategies as well.

If you’re interested in collecting, storing, and retrieving data, Karlicoss has a bunch of good ideas in his post. It’s a long post with lots of links but definitely worth spending a bit of time on.