Ben Simon has a nice example of leveraging Emacs to solve a problem and reduce his workflow friction. During his video calls he would bring up a notepad file to capture his notes and share them with his the other callers as a sort of whiteboard. The problem was that he ended up with a mishmash of files with ambiguous names that made organizing his notes difficult.
Like me, one day he realized this process was silly and he decided to move the task to Emacs. He determined he should file his notes in a file hierarchy along the lines of notes/customer/project/date.md. Simon’s desired process is to invoke a single function that will bring up a in the desired hierarchy. That means he needs to determine
- His current customer
- That customer’s project
- Today’s date
Simon shows how he determines those parameters. The date, of course, is easy but the others are a little bit tricky, especially since he’s using both Git and Subversion to host his project files. Still, it takes just a little bit of Elisp to bring up the required file. His post is worth taking a look at just to see how he interacts with his file hierarchy to get the information needed to accomplish the task.
Update : Added link to Simon’s post.