Irreal

Aqeel Akber has a nice post up about his recent switch to an almost paperless workflow. Akber is a physicist so he has lots of notes to take on his various projects. Until recently he kept them in separate notebooks for each project or subject area. About 8 months ago he started keeping digital notes in Emacs instead.

He did that by making a (pretty much one-to-one) translation from notebooks to Org files. He used the scheme outlined by Howard Abrams that I wrote about a couple of years ago. The result is that he now has electronic versions of his notebooks that are searchable and easily shareable either in whole or in part.

So far, he doesn’t appear to be make use of the excellent Org Babel functionality to integrate calculations and results into his notes and he doesn’t mention that he is using Org mode to write his papers. Of course with only 8 months in he’s still a relative n00b so I’m sure he’ll start making use of these facilities if he isn’t already. On the other hand, he’s discovered something that I didn’t know about Org mode. You can encrypt individual headlines in an Org file simply by adding a :crypt: tag to it. You need a bit configuration in your init.el file that Akber shows in his post.

I always learn something useful from posts like his so I recommend that you take a look. You may or may not want to adopt his exact methods but you’re sure to learn some useful ideas.

Karl Voit has a nice bit of Elisp that makes it easy for him to set Org mode properties. He maintains his contacts in an Org file that (presumably) has the contact names in the headings and details, such as phone numbers, as Org properties associated with each heading. When a phone number changes, he makes note of that in the heading but also wants to update the phone number property.

He does that by highlighting the phone number on the headline and calling his code, which asks him which property he wants to change. He gets a list from which he can select and the highlighted region is set to the value of that property.

If you have a use case similar to Voit’s, take a look at his code. It may make your workflow easier.

A Christmas present from Bastien

#emacs #orgmode 9.0.3 – a bugfix release – is out. Enjoy and merry christmas!

— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) December 24, 2016

Rainer König has the latest video up in his OrgMode tutorial series. This time he discusses his personal Org mode file structure and workflow. I always find it interesting to see how others do these sorts of thing so I really enjoyed his video.

The video is about 21 and a half minutes so you may have to schedule some time to watch it.

John Kitchin has a nice post that illustrates how to install context sensitive speed keys for Org mode headings. I didn’t know a framework for this existed so I found his article interesting and informative.

The particular problem he is solving is extracting an email address from an Org file of contacts and opening an email buffer so that he can send an email to the contact. He also has keys for copying the address to clipboard in various ways. That’s interesting and many will find it useful for their own work but the real value, I think, is explaining how you go about installing speed keys for Org mode.

Take a look at his code for the details. It’s pretty simple if you know a bit of Elisp. He also shows how to retrieve a property from an Org mode entry so there’s a lot to learn from his code.