Irreal

If you like to visualize your projects and tasks with mind-mapping, like
to work with an interactive GUI, and don’t mind proprietary software,
you may like The Brain. You can see how it works in this video. It
appears to be an excellent and well thought out product.

But I’m not here to shill for The Brain. I mention it because it’s the
inspiration for a very nice package by Erik Sjöstrand: org-brain. It’s
a concept mapping application built on top of Org mode and Emacs. It does
the same sorts of things as The Brain but from inside Emacs. If you
prefer keeping your hands on the home row to clicking and dragging on
a GUI you should check out org-brain.

You can get an idea of how org-brain works by watching Sjöstrand’s
video demonstration of it. To get the most out of the Sjöstrand’s
video I recommend watching The Brain video first because it helps
clarify the problem both applications are trying to solve and how they
go about it.

I don’t think my mind works in a way that makes mind-mapping a natural
fit for me but lots of people I know and respect make it an important
part of their workflow. If you’re one of those people, you should
definitely take a look at org-brain.

Regular readers know that I am very enamored of Howard Abrams’
excellent post and video on literate devops. It’s not that my duties
include devops; rather it’s that the methods he demonstrates are
applicable to a wide range of problems that we encounter in the
technical fields. The idea of maintaining a little “notebook” that
describes a problem and its solution—along with any code used in that
solution—is a very powerful technique. It’s one I’ve been trying to
apply in my day-to-day tasks.

It turns out that Matúš Goljer (Fuco1) feels the same way. He has a
really great post that begins by sketching out a typical use of the
technique. He was working on a personal version the app stack where
the problem occurred and wanted to repeat the process on the staging
and production systems. Everything was the same between the systems
except the port number used to access the pertinent database.

Easy enough, just change the port number and rerun things. But that
port number was used in several places so rather than replace them all
he made another code block that returned the port number and accessed
it with org-babel-ref-resolve in every code block that needed it.
Now he simply needed to change the port number in one place to access
any of the systems.

He works with a lot of systems so it became difficult to remember the
port number for any given system. He solved that problem by adding a
list of port numbers above the code block that returns the needed port
number. Then he thought that, gee, that looks just like a set of
buttons that I should be able to click on to choose the right port.
What he really wanted, of course, was a list of radio buttons. Org
doesn’t support that but John Kitchin had a post with some code for
doing it.

Fuco1 refactored Kitchin’s code, packaged it up on GitHub, and then
used it in his notebooks. Now when he wants to run things on a
different system, he just clicks on the target system and everything
else is taken care of. This is a really brilliant solution and his
post is a must read for anyone who want to use Abrams’ techniques in
their own work.

Update [2018-03-11 Sun 14:44]: Matus → Matúš.

Over at Academia Obscura they have a list of 10 essential tools for
academics and PhD students. It’s a useful list but my immediate
reaction upon reading it was that you can do all that with Emacs.
Well, you can’t backup your data with Emacs but other than that you
can forget about all those tools and just use Emacs.

Here’s a list of those tools and how Emacs (and Org mode) can do the
same things and often, in my opinion, better:

Citation Manager

Use John Kitchen’s org-ref. Here’s a video that
shows it in action as well as demonstrating using Org mode to
write a paper.

Scrivener

Org mode can export to almost any format and is
infinitely configurable to work your way;

Evernote

Org mode can store and index content seamlessly. You can
attach data to an Org entry including PDFs or links to
HTML. You can even download your Evernote content to Org;

Trello

This is what Org mode was made for. TODO lists and agendas
that can accumulate tasks from multiple lists. John
Goerzen explains why he gave up other tools for this in
favor of Org mode. If you can’t give up Trello—because of
collaboration, say—org-trello lets you interface it and
Org mode. And, it’s all local. If you’re offline, it’s
still available;

Unroll.me

Elfeed delivers all your feeds and mailing lists to a
single list that can be perused at your leisure. If you
really need to get some of your feeds via email,
open a second, free, account to receive them. Then let
mu4e, or notmuch, or something similar download those
emails whenever you like.

Twitter

You shouldn’t be wasting your time on Twitter but if you
must, Emacs has several Twitter clients that bring
everything into the Emacs environment;

Anti-Social

You don’t need any special tools for this; just
redirect those sites to localhost. If you need finer
grained control, Matt Mite has some suggestions;

Coach.me

You can ask Org to remind you everyday or you can use
any of the several pomodoro applications available for Emacs;

A clipboard manager

Emacs can handle this on its own but you can
make it even better with counsel-yank-pop;

An external drive/backup plan

Emacs can’t do this, of course, but
it is important so get a backup plan that operates in the
background and doesn’t require any action on your part.

If you’re like me, your initial reaction is probably that Emacs is the
obvious choice for STEM folks but that maybe Emacs is too much for
those in the Liberal Arts. Really, though, that’s just snobbery. Many
people in the “soft sciences” and liberal arts have shown themselves
able to learn and use Emacs just as effectively as their brethren in
the sciences and engineering. Just like for the rest of us, Emacs has
a steep learning curve and takes a concerted effort to master but I
doubt it’s harder than learning those other 9 tools.

John Goerzen has returned to Emacs after a decade of being a Vim user.
His reason for doing so is Org mode. If all you want from your editor
is to edit, Vim is hard to beat: it’s fast, loads in a flash, and its
composable command set make it flexible and easy to learn. If
you use Vim, however, you’re going to need a bunch of other tools to
handle things like your agenda and TODO lists.

Emacs, of course, has Org mode, which nicely integrates these
functions into the editor and lets you easily link all your data
together under the Org aegis. Goerzen does a nice job of explaining
how Emacs and Org mode make tying together your data and data
collection tasks easy.

He mentions, for example, recording a task to answer an email sometime
in the future. With many tools, this is difficult or impossible but
Org makes it easy to tie an email to a TODO item so that when the time
comes to deal with it, you can simply click on the link and bring the
email up in your email client. I do this all the time and even have a
special template to automatically capture the email link.

Goerzen’s post is the first of a series of planned posts on his use of
Org mode. The second and third are already done and more are planned.
This is a great series for Org beginners. It’s written from the point
of view of a developer trying to streamline his workflow. If you’re an
Org user or thinking about becoming one, be sure to check out this
series.

How much would you pay for Org mode? $10? $25? $100? More? Well
fortunately you don’t have to pay anything at all because, of course,
Org mode is free software in all senses of the word “free.” Still,
free software does have a cost even if we aren’t the ones paying. Most
often that cost is the significant free labor that the implementers
and maintainers provide.

Sometimes the cost includes more than the free labor. Bastien Guerry
is one of the principal maintainers of Org accounting for, according
to Karl Voit, more than 20% of the commits. But now Bastien’s computer
is dying and he can’t afford to get a new one:

Okay, here is the situation: I badly need to replace my 3yo dying computer but I can’t afford to buy one. If you ever considered making a donation for #emacs #orgmode but didn’t take the time, now is your chance :) Reach me at https://t.co/rNgMVrU09u or https://t.co/DI9iwZ5rfE

— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) March 4, 2018

I don’t know what computer prices are like in Paris but whatever they
are, if every Org user chipped in a small amount, Bastien would be
able to replace his dying machine with a new and powerful computer so
that he could continue his vital work. Of course, not every Org user
can afford to help but if you can, please chip in a few Euros. I’ve
sent him €20; that’s only about $25 US. If even 100 people do the
same, Bastien will probably have enough for a decent replacement.