Someone tweeted a link to a 6-month-old post by Murat Demirbas, a computer scientist at SUNY Buffalo. The post, My Emacs Journey, describes Demirbas’ use of Emacs and his embracing of Org mode. He’s been using Emacs for over 20 years and says that he has reached the stage where his Emacs knowledge is mostly held in his muscle memory. He says that if you ask him what the key sequence for some command is, he can’t tell you until he types it and observes what he typed. I experience something similar: if you give me a key sequence and ask me what it does, I’ll have to stop and think and possibly won’t know even though I use it all the time without conscious effort. As Demirbas says, the knowledge is held in my muscle memory.
He writes at length about how Org mode changed his workflow. Like me, he uses it for writing, task management, and even to organize his thinking. I liked how he uses Org for his writing. It reminded me of a technique I’d forgotten about. When he’s writing a paper and defines a term, he turns it into a radio-target so that every time he uses it in the sequel, the new use gets turned into a link back to the definition. That’s a natural thing to do but I always forget about it.
I spent a long time reading his post because he had several interesting links to other posts or information. Take a look at his post to see what I mean.