Here’s a short tip for those of you who are mouseketeers as well as Emacs users. As regular readers know, I eschew the mouse as much as I can but others disagree. It is, after all, a matter of taste so either preference is fine.
If you do like using the mouse, Ken Huang has a tip to share that you may find useful. He likes to emphasize his Org text (by putting it in bold) but he got tired of having to surround the text with a *. His solution was to advise mouse-set-region so that the highlighted text was automatically surrounded by the appropriate markup.
I do pretty much the same thing by using org-emphasize (bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+f) without using the mouse and it allows me to choose the markup.
Huang’s post is just another example of how Emacs lets you customize your workflow to what’s most appropriate to you. If you want to specify the markup for the marked text, it would be easy to call a function to specify the markup character rather than defaulting to *. You may or may not want his customization but it gives you an idea of how to adapt Emacs to your workflow.