Irreal

Someone tweeted a link to a 6-month-old post by Murat Demirbas, a computer scientist at SUNY Buffalo. The post, My Emacs Journey, describes Demirbas’ use of Emacs and his embracing of Org mode. He’s been using Emacs for over 20 years and says that he has reached the stage where his Emacs knowledge is mostly held in his muscle memory. He says that if you ask him what the key sequence for some command is, he can’t tell you until he types it and observes what he typed. I experience something similar: if you give me a key sequence and ask me what it does, I’ll have to stop and think and possibly won’t know even though I use it all the time without conscious effort. As Demirbas says, the knowledge is held in my muscle memory.

He writes at length about how Org mode changed his workflow. Like me, he uses it for writing, task management, and even to organize his thinking. I liked how he uses Org for his writing. It reminded me of a technique I’d forgotten about. When he’s writing a paper and defines a term, he turns it into a radio-target so that every time he uses it in the sequel, the new use gets turned into a link back to the definition. That’s a natural thing to do but I always forget about it.

I spent a long time reading his post because he had several interesting links to other posts or information. Take a look at his post to see what I mean.

Org-mode seems to be gobbling up everything having to do with text generation. Here’s the latest example:

Using #markdown blocks in #emacs #orgmode to automatically generate pdf files :-) That’s a way to combine multiple documents in one orgmode file. pic.twitter.com/saGyppkVdH

— Tobias Hölterhof (@hoelterhof) May 10, 2019

That’s pretty neat. Given that Org markup is superior to Markdown—sorry Markdown partisans, it is—it’s a bit hard to envision a non-contrived use case for the functionality but they surely exist. One example might be if you want to integrate some existing Markdown into an Org document. Doubtless folks with better imaginations can think of others.

It’s no wonder that Org envy is spreading to users of those other editors. There are already several ports to some of those editors as well as a standalone version. Of course, Org documents are plain text so you can trivially use any editor to write them but it’s Org’s integration with Emacs that provides the wonderful display, text wrangling capabilities, and, of course, (executable) Babel code blocks.

Just after I published yesterday’s post on Org-mode Gems, I discovered that Cheong Yiufung has another post up with some more Org gems. This time he considers Org Table Gems. In this post he demonstrates three things about working with Org tables that you might not know:

1. Operating on table regions.
2. Converting a (semi-formatted) region to a table.
3. Special markings to name rows, columns, and fields and to enable automatic recalculation.

As before, he has animations showing the gems in action. This time, however, he used mp4 instead of gif for the animation. That has certain advantages, I guess, but, for me at least, comes with a problem. I couldn’t figure out how to freeze the animation without having the video control bar cover the minibuffer. That’s a problem because I want to follow what he’s typing and sometimes it’s necessary to freeze the video to read a longer command.

That’s a small nit, of course, and Yiufung more than makes up for it with a little extra at the end. He shows how he used Dired to bulk convert his animations from webm format—which doesn’t work well with the Safari browser—to mp4. It’s a nice workflow and worth studying because the same ideas are portable to other bulk conversions or, really, any command line action on multiple files.

Every Org-mode user is aware that Org is a huge package stuffed with all sorts of useful functionality. For most of us, a lot of that functionality remains unknown and hidden. Most often the only way to find out about it is to read the Org-mode manual but that can be an undertaking.

Luckily, Cheong Yiufung has done the reading for us and made a very nice post that reveals some of the gems he found. The post mentions six pieces of functionality and illustrates them with animated GIFS. The six items are:

1. Avoid inadvertently editing in a folded area.
2. Show headings only.
3. Clone trees with a time shift.
4. Hide empty lines between headings in collapsed view.
5. Turn lists into subtrees.
6. Demote sequence for list bullets.

He also mentions a couple of miscellaneous items.

I’ve been a heavy Org user for many years but all six of those items were new to me. With Org, as with Emacs, there’s always something else to learn. Perhaps I should just RTFM from cover-to-cover but I’ve never had much luck in reading whole manuals. Fortunately in this case, Yiufung has done that for me. If you’re an Org user, you really should spend a few minutes reading Yiufung’s post. It’s a great post and definitely worth your time.

Nathan Lovato has a tutorial on using Org-mode with Spacemacs. It’s longer and more comprehensive than Jack of Some’s introductory video on Org with Spacemacs, but as with that video, Lovato’s looks at Org from the Spacemacs user’s point of view. If you’re not a Spacemacs user, you probably won’t find the tutorial too helpful. If you are a Spacemacs user or are thinking of becoming one you might find it useful.

After a short introduction, he covers creating and manipulating nodes, widening/narrowing, lists, and checkmarks. Then he moves on to using Org for task management, including TODO keywords and time tracking.

Next, he takes up using sparse trees, column view, tags, and sorting. He approaches these from the point of view of searching and organizing your data. I, at least, usually forget about sparse trees and column view but that’s a mistake because they can be very useful for accessing your data. Lately, I’ve been making a point of using it just to burn it into my muscle memory.

Finally, he shows how he exports his Org data to his (Android) smart phone using Orgzly. Of course, if you’re living on the Apple plantation, Orgzly won’t work for you but there are other options such as beorg.

The best way to think of this tutorial is not as a how-to but as a demonstration of some of the things Org can do. The video moves quickly but Lovato provides a list of topics and their timestamp so you can easily revisit any topic you want to see again.