Useful Emacs and Org-mode Features

Karl Voit gave an excellent talk at Grazer Linuxtage 2021 on some Org Mode features that you may not know. The talk also covered some Emacs features that he uses to enhance his workflow. He has an outline of the talk on his website so you needn’t worry about trying to take notes or writing down any shortcuts that you don’t already know.

Experienced Emacsers probably already know a lot of the things he covers but I learned a couple of new things so it’s definitely worth watching. The first new—or perhaps, forgotten—thing that I learned about was scroll-lock-mode. It’s not something I would use everyday, but sometime it’s just what I want. It’s an easy way to read a document without have a scroll page by page. Voit maps it to the scroll lock key which, if you have one, is a handy way of activating it.

Sort of related to scroll-lock-mode is view-mode, which makes the buffer read only and lets you scroll up and down by the page or half page using Space, Delete, d, and u. You can also search with s.

Next, he demonstrates various ways of entering and changing time stamps including using the relative timer for note taking during a meeting or video. He also discusses using the :crypt: tags to encrypt a node in an Org tree and doing a regex search using sparse trees.

The final part of the talk are some customizations mostly using packages. These include his really powerful use of hydras and his use of the eyebrowse package to organize his Emacs work spaces.

The talk is just short of 41 minutes but it moves quickly and is very enjoyable. Highly recommended.

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