Just after I published yesterday’s post on Org-mode Gems, I discovered that Cheong Yiufung has another post up with some more Org gems. This time he considers Org Table Gems. In this post he demonstrates three things about working with Org tables that you might not know:
- Operating on table regions.
- Converting a (semi-formatted) region to a table.
- Special markings to name rows, columns, and fields and to enable automatic recalculation.
As before, he has animations showing the gems in action. This time, however, he used mp4 instead of gif for the animation. That has certain advantages, I guess, but, for me at least, comes with a problem. I couldn’t figure out how to freeze the animation without having the video control bar cover the minibuffer. That’s a problem because I want to follow what he’s typing and sometimes it’s necessary to freeze the video to read a longer command.
That’s a small nit, of course, and Yiufung more than makes up for it with a little extra at the end. He shows how he used Dired to bulk convert his animations from webm format—which doesn’t work well with the Safari browser—to mp4. It’s a nice workflow and worth studying because the same ideas are portable to other bulk conversions or, really, any command line action on multiple files.