Irreal

Frédérick Giasson, whom I’ve mentioned before, has a nice post on setting up Org mode for literate programming. Giasson’s post is mostly concerned with using literate programming to write Clojure but almost all of his setup is usable for other languages.

It’s a testament to the power of Org mode that very little has to be changed from the default settings to have a first class environment. Most of the significant changes that Giasson made involved setting up the environment for Clojure.

One non-trivial change he made for Org was to tangle the code automatically when the file is saved. That keeps the code file up-to-date with the Org source file. To make sure his buffers stay up to date, he calls global-auto-revert-mode so that when the code file is updated, any open buffers for the file are reloaded.

If you’re interested in trying out literate programming in an easy way, give Giasson’s post a read to see how little effort is required.

Andreas Gerler has a nice post that shows how to access individual table columns in a source block. If you don’t do this sort of thing frequently, it’s easy to forget the details. If you occasionally need this capability or think you might, bookmark this post so you have an easy way to reacquaint yourself with the procedure.

I haven’t written about using Org source blocks for a long time but they are tremendously powerful. If, for example, you’re writing up a lab report for a class, this is a wonderful way to put your data and exact calculations in the same file and then export the parts you want to turn in to a nicely formatted PDF file.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s just reproducible research writ small. If you’re out of school and producing reports or writing up results, the process is just as useful. I use this type of thing all the time in my day to day work and consider it one of the great things about Org mode and Emacs. If you want to see an another example of this sort of thing, I wrote about it here.

Rainer König is producing a series of video tutorials on Org mode. Each video is typically short—less than 10 minutes—and addresses a specific aspect of Org. If you’re looking for an easy introduction to Org mode, this is what you want.

So far there are 8 videos¹ but more are being added continually. There’s a convenient “Play all” button that will play all the videos in order. The 8 videos are just under 57 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time but they’re easy to watch and you can always watch them piecemeal during coffee breaks or other spare time.

Because each video focuses on a specific target, König is able to cover that topic in reasonable depth. As usual with these introductory tutorials, I was still able to learn something new. König’s explanation of follow mode helped me understand the point of the functionality.

If you’re an Org mode user or you’re interested in learning about it, these videos are worth your time. They’re an easy way to learn the basics or review what you already know. Highly recommended.

John Kitchin, who does a lot—most?—of his writing in Org mode sometimes wants to copy and paste Org text into other applications such as Word or the mail app. He wants more than just doing a verbatim copy, he wants the text to keep its formatting. Thus he wants links to appear as links instead of the Org markup for links, italics to appear as italics instead of text between slashes, and so on.

He noticed that this is what happens when you copy from, say, the browser, but not when you copy from Org. The answer, as this video explains, is to first convert the text to rich text format and then copy it to the clip board. After that, it can be pasted into the appropriate app.

Kitchin presents a bit of Elisp to take care of this on the Mac platform but it’s easy to see how you can adapt it to use tools appropriate to whatever platform you’re using. If you’re unfortunate enough to sometimes need to paste Org data into Word, this is just what you need. It’s easy to set up and pretty much seamless—other than assigning a key sequence to the code—to use.

I ended yesterday’s post by noting that if you maintain a daily journal or log of your activities, you can get a timesheet for free. But what if you aren’t maintaining a log or journal? This

I've used #orgmode for this in the past. https://t.co/wDL1kHTm9O

— Gareth Smith (@totherme) June 13, 2016

tweet inspired me to write about my journal, what’s in it, and how I maintain it. You won’t be surprised to learn that it’s all Org based.

I’ve always maintained a log book in which I kept track of what I was doing and ideas or notes that I might want to remember later. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of Lab Notebook. Before Org, I kept everything in a quad ruled, bound computation book. That’s a good solution but Org mode is much better.

Org capture makes it easy to make entries that are automatically filed according to day. The file is tree structured as¹

* Year
** Month
*** Day
**** {time-stamped entries}

but the Org agenda search commands make it easy to jump to a particular date if I need to.

By far, the most important aspect of the journal is the tags. For example, every time I publish a blog entry it gets logged in my journal with a tag of blog. That makes it easy to find published blog posts, especially since each entry contains a link to the metadata for the post.

The tags make it possible to keep unrelated subject matter in the same file. For instance, I used to have a separate log file that I used to record events with other people that I might need to recall. A typical example is dealing with an account problem for some service. I can record the time and date of the call, who I talked to, and what the resolution of the problem was. Now I just add those entries to my journal with a tag of LOG. If the call was with my ISP, I add a tag of isp and then I can search the relevant entries by looking for entries with the tags LOG and isp.

Although I keep data in files other than my journal, I try to put as much as possible in journal.org. That includes pretty much everything I do during the day and even what restaurant I have dinner at if I eat out. Using a single file makes it easy to search for items or to make large edits on the file². If you aren’t using a journal yet, I’d start with a single file until you discover that you need more. Once you get used to keeping the log, it will become second nature and you won’t have to think about it. And you’ll get a timesheet for free.

("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/journal.org")
         "* %<%R: >%? %^g\n%t")