Irreal

For those looking for a way to produce slides with Emacs and Org mode, there are two popular options: Beamer and reveal.js. Each solution has its partisans but if you’re in the reveal.js camp, Yujie Wen has an org-reveal package that allows reveal.js slide decks to be produced with Org mode.

The process is pretty simple. By default, each top level heading is a new slide containing the content of that heading. Subheadings are child slides that sit logically below the parent slide. You can add options to the entire deck or individual slides to control how the slides display.

Wen’s readme.org that comes with the package is a complete manual for using org-reveal and can also be exported to a slide deck. In that way, it serves not only as a manual for using the org-reveal package but as a go-by for writing your own slides.

If you give talks, are an instructor, or otherwise need to generate presentations, this is a nice package that’s easy to use and doesn’t take very much effort to get up to speed with. Definitely worth checking out.

Haoyang Xu has a really nice idea for managing your dotfiles. The idea is a generalization of using Org mode to configure Emacs, a strategy that many people have written about (here’s a pointer to a video about it). Using Org mode has the advantage that it’s easy to document your choices in a way that’s much harder to do by just adding comments. Grant Rettke has an example of this idea on steroids: he documents everything about his Emacs configuration including why he chose one configuration item over another.

Xu extends this concept to all your configuration files. You collect your configuration data in an Org file with a header for each subject area—mail, say—and have subheadings for particular dotfiles—like .mbsync, .msmtprc, and so on. Xu’s post has the details and some examples. He also shows how to extend the idea.

This may not be worth the trouble if you have a single machine but if you maintain two or more machines that have similar configurations, this is a real win. You can have a single (versioned) Org file that has all your configuration data, making it easy to maintain consistent configurations from a single file. Xu even shows how to configure remote machines.

I really like this idea and will probably implement it the next time I have to set up a new machine. Of course, it’s easy to start slow and keep adding additional dotfiles. That’s probably what I’ll do. When I get around to that new machine, I’ll already have my Org file ready to go and tested.

Howard Abrams recently gave a talk at the PDX Emacs Hangout in Portland. So far, there is no video of the talk but Abrams did write up his notes¹. The talk was intended to be a workshop so you should work through his examples as you read the notes.

The idea of the workshop is using Org Babel for Literate Programming. Abrams demonstrates that you can do straight Literate Programming à la Knuth but the real power of the Org/Babel combination is the ability to mix languages, run the code in situ, and then incorporate the results of the program directly into the text.

Babel has many ways to accomplish those last two steps and the bulk of Abrams’ workshop is devoted to exploring the different ways to input and export data to the code. The notes are an excellent summary of the capabilities of Org/Babel and worth bookmarking.

I’ve written before of how enjoyable using Org/Babel for writing papers and organizing projects is. You get all the benefits of reproducible research as well as a pleasant environment in which to work. Babel really is one of the killer features of Org mode even though it’s less well known and appreciated than some of Org’s other features. If you aren’t familiar with it, take a look at Abrams notes and start feeling the power.

Rohan Kshirsagar has a nice post on integrating Emacs Org Mode into the software engineering process. That’s a big subject area, of course, but Kshirsagar focuses on using Org to take notes as things occur to you and perhaps turn some of them into TODO items. That’s only a tiny bit of the Org functionality that can be useful to a developer but it’s an important one.

The idea is that as you’re working some idea may occur to you and you’d like to capture it. If you have to switch to another application and do a lot of busy work to write your idea down, you can lose focus on your main task. A nice thing about Org is that it has a built-in facility to quickly and easily capture notes and store them in an Org file. It doesn’t take many brain cycles because almost everything is automatic.

I like this facility so much that I even have a global hot key to bring up the Org capture menu from any application on my machine. I mostly use this in conjunction with the browser when I want to make a note of something I’m reading but it works from anywhere.

Kshirsagar also points out that if—heaven forfend—some members of your team are not Emacs users, Org mode makes it easy to publish the notes as HTML and share them either on the team server or a public area of your workstation. It’s a useful post and worth a read so head on over.