Irreal

A couple of days ago, I was adding some item to my journal—which is really my engineering note book—and when my capture template prompted me for a tag and I started to type it in, I noticed that in the list of suggestions (from Ivy) there was a misspelled tag. That happens fairly regularly. Sometimes I make a flat out typo, sometimes I unconsciously capitalize a proper noun (my policy is all tags are lower case), and sometimes I use a slightly different tag from what I usually do.

When I find a bad tag, I fix it by searching my agenda files with the m option from the Agenda menu¹ to bring up the headlines with the offending tag and then fix it by editing the tag with Ctrl+c Ctrl+q.

This time, I’d finally had enough and decided to get rid of them all. The question was how to get a list of all the tags? I first tried grep but the result was a mess and too hard to work with. Then I thought that if Ivy was gathering that list for its completing read, there must be an easy way to do it. I asked for help on functions, typed in “org tag”, and looked through the completions until I found org-global-tags-completion-table. That did exactly what I wanted so I fired up ielm, invoked org-global-tags-completion-table, and had a nice list of tags. I didn’t bother sorting it, I just read down the list until a found a bad tag and called the match TAGS query to bring up the affected headlines so I could fix them. It turned out there were a lot of bad tags but it was easy, if boring, to find and fix them all.

The point of this post is twofold. First, Emacs gives you the tools to fix problems in your data even if several files are involved. It also gives you an easy way to discover those tools. Secondly, the exercise reminded me of the power of ielm. Usually, when I need to run a random elisp command I do it from the minibuffer. This time I needed an easily accessible list so I used ielm. I tend to forget about it but it’s often just what you need, even in situations that don’t involve elisp development.

If I had to do this a lot, I’d write some code to handle correcting the bad tags but that didn’t seem worth the trouble in this case. Still, if I ever decide I need to, Emacs has all the tools to make it easy.

A year ago, I wrote about Howard Abrams’ post on Capturing Content for Emacs. I just saw a current reference to the post and reread it. It’s a really great article and worth mentioning again in case you missed it.

The basic idea is to make capturing data and inserting it into the currently clocked in task as effortless as possible. Abrams starts with some simple templates that show how to add a capture to the currently clocked in task and then moves on to adding data directly from the system clipboard to the current task. He even shows how to move selected text in an Emacs buffer to the current task.

All of that uses just the normal capture template mechanisms built into Org-mode. What I really liked was how he arranged to move data from the browser or other apps into the current task. One example is a simple shell script that you can put at the end of a pipeline to capture the output from the rest of the pipeline and import it into your current task.

He also considers capturing text and HTML preserving the necessary formatting and changing (HTML) links into Org links. He shows how to do it for macOS and Linux.

If you haven’t already read his post or you’ve forgotten the details, you really should take a look. There are a lot of great tricks that can help reduce friction in your workflow.

Jonathan Bennett has another post up in his Year of Emacs series. This one is about writing academic papers. Bennett is in the humanities but still uses Emacs and Org-mode to write his papers. I’m always interested in posts like this because writers in the humanities have special conventions they need to follow so seeing how they adjust the Org workflow to meet them is instructive. You shouldn’t think, however, that his post is useful only to those working in the humanities. The same setup will work for any discipline.

Bennett’s tool chain is mainly

• Zotero for library management
• Org-mode and LaTeX to produce PDFs
• org-ref to manage his citations
• PDF tools for reading and marking up papers
• Magit/Git for version control

Zotero is a nice tool and open source so there’s no reason to avoid it but as shown in Kitchin’s video on org-ref you probably don’t need it. Org-ref can download papers in several ways and using it means there’s one less tool to learn and worry about.

One very nice thing about Bennett’s post for beginners is that he doesn’t assume you know how to configure things for a workflow like his and he show’s everything that’s necessary.

This is a nice post and well worth reading if you’re involved in writing papers either professionally or as a student. Bennett explains why he prefers not to use Word or one of its evil progeny but, of course, Irreal readers are already familiar with reasons to avoid them. Really, it’s hard to envision a nicer writing environment than one involving Org and org-ref.

Cheong Yiufung has another great post up in his Org-mode Hidden Gems series. The latest post takes a look at Org-mode TODO functionality. As usual, I learned some new things proving again that the “hidden gems” tag is appropriate, at least for me.

Most Org users know that you can specify your own TOTO tags and make them anything you want. Yiufung shows how you can use that fact to implement a sort of lightweight task assignment system. I’d probably implement this with check boxes under a project heading but you may like Yiufung’s system better: take a look and see.

Next, he discusses TODO statistics. Those are the cookies that tell you how much of a task has been completed. Normally, the statistics cover the entire subtree so that even subtasks are counted. It’s possible, though, to specify that you want them to act in a hierarchical manner. Then, each (sub)subtree is treated as a unit and can have it’s own counter. Yiufung has a video that shows this and makes it clear how the two modes differ.

Finally, he looks at the Org habits functionality. This is useful for repetitive tasks such as exercising when you want to track your progress. Org gives you a nice graphical summary of how well you’re doing. Again, take a look Yiufung’s video to see what it looks like.