Four Org-mode Talks

The SF Emacs Meetup group has a video of one of their recent meetings featuring talks by four Org-mode users. The middle two talks, Tikhon Elvis on reveal.js and Jeff Tull on Org Babel, are elementary overviews. They’ll be useful for those unfamiliar with the two packages but probably won’t help users who already know them.

The other two talks, John Wiegley on how he uses Org-mode, and John Kitchin on how he and his group use Org-mode to publish scientific papers, will appeal to more experienced Org-mode users.

Wiegley’s talk is really about his workflow but that workflow is Org-mode-centric so he concentrates on how he uses Org-mode to manage his life. One the big takeaways from his talk is that he doesn’t spend a lot of time in the actual Org files. Rather, he depends on the Org agenda—along with some custom views—to track his days and keep on top of things. It’s a really interesting talk and best of all, his configuration is available in his GitHub repository. One trick I learned was using a UUID as the ID property as the target for links. That’s useful if, as I often do, you want to edit the header for the link (the default target). If I make a typo or otherwise want to change one of my headers, I can’t without changing every reference. Using the ID as a target instead solves that problem neatly.

Kitchin’s talk takes us through the process he uses for writing and submitting papers to scientific journals using Org mode. Irreal has covered part of that process before, especially the really excellent org-ref package but not the actual process of preparing an article for a specific journal. The journals are notoriously crabby about the exact format you have to use when submitting papers and its more than just a house style sheet. Kitchin covers how he and his group have automated most of these annoying details. He’s the expert on this stuff because, as he says, his group have published about 30 papers using Org-mode, which is more than anyone else in the world.

The videos are a little over an hour and 45 minutes so you’ll have to schedule time but they are definitely worthwhile.

UPDATE [2019-09-19 Thu 14:27]: Fixed link to video.

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