Chris Mariana has an interesting video on how to prevent losing files when writing in Org mode. It’s a useful post but not really enough to write about. The TL;DR is that it explains how to locate files that were saved with org-attach.
That video, though, led me to another video of his on writing in Org mode, which is an elementary introduction to writing documents with Org. Mariana begins by noting that a big advantage of this approach is that you’re writing in plain text and that brings many advantages such as easy version control, flexible export, and others. And, of course, although he doesn’t mention it, the avoidance of lock in: your plain text document will always be readable even if you change text editors or yours disappears.
From there, he moves on to the basic structure of an Org document and some of the ways to manipulate it. Org, of course, can be thought of as two things:
- A lightweight markup language
- An Emacs mode that implements many features including an easy way to edit and operate on Org documents from within Emacs
Mariana’s video is more about the second of those although he does cover a few of the markup features. He also shows some of the flexibility of the export system. You won’t become an expert in writing with Org from this video but it does gives you a good feeling for what the process is like and why you might want to find out more.
The video is 17 minutes long so plan accordingly.