Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another Emacs podcast. As I said in my first post about his podcasts, using a podcast to discuss Emacs may seem odd but it actually works pretty well.
Davletkaliyev starts by telling us what’s changed in his configuration and approach since the last podcast. The major changes are the addition of Helm and Projectile. With them he was able to recreate some of the functionality that he likes best in Sublime. In one case he was even able to expand on that workflow. Another example of how you can make Emacs work your way.
The majority of the podcast is about Org mode. I was a bit surprised at how much Org functionality he was able to harness as a n00b. It certainly took me a lot longer. Of course, as he makes a point of saying, there’s no need to be intimidated by the vastness of Org. You can start off with just a few of the basic functions and discover new capabilities as you need them.
The first thing he liked about Org is its ability to link to other files (or parts of other files). That makes it easy to tie together related files and topics in the usual hypertext way. He reminds us several times that the magic of Org is that it has all these capabilities but is just plain text. You can read it—or even create it—with any editor.
He especially likes Org tables. They’re easy to use and create and bring along spreadsheet capability for free. That seems like almost a throwaway but almost every Org table I create uses that functionality in some way. It’s just too convenient to ignore.
Like me, he really likes the Babel functionality. The ability to add code blocks and export (or not) the code and embed the result in your document all without leaving Org mode can not be overpraised. It’s one of the centers of my workflow.
He also talks about TODOs, one of the fundamental functions of Org. He likes how they can distributed among many different files and summarized in the agenda. He also likes that it integrates the functions of three other applications that he was using for the same thing: Things, the Mac Notes app, and iA Writer. He especially likes how all the information is available to each of the three functions in Org, which is not the case with the three separate applications.
Finally, he describes how he implemented a list of browser links and automatically exports it to HTML so that it is available to his browser. He finds that much nicer and easier to navigate than using the native browser bookmarks.
The podcast is a bit over 29 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. I enjoyed it; perhaps you will too.