John Goerzen has returned to Emacs after a decade of being a Vim user.
His reason for doing so is Org mode. If all you want from your editor
is to edit, Vim is hard to beat: it’s fast, loads in a flash, and its
composable command set make it flexible and easy to learn. If
you use Vim, however, you’re going to need a bunch of other tools to
handle things like your agenda and TODO lists.
Emacs, of course, has Org mode, which nicely integrates these
functions into the editor and lets you easily link all your data
together under the Org aegis. Goerzen does a nice job of explaining
how Emacs and Org mode make tying together your data and data
collection tasks easy.
He mentions, for example, recording a task to answer an email sometime
in the future. With many tools, this is difficult or impossible but
Org makes it easy to tie an email to a TODO item so that when the time
comes to deal with it, you can simply click on the link and bring the
email up in your email client. I do this all the time and even have a
special template to automatically capture the email link.
Goerzen’s post is the first of a series of planned posts on his use of
Org mode. The second and third are already done and more are planned.
This is a great series for Org beginners. It’s written from the point
of view of a developer trying to streamline his workflow. If you’re an
Org user or thinking about becoming one, be sure to check out this
series.