Irreal

In yesterday’s post, I discussed Karl Voit’s love letter to Org mode and how he’s come to depend on it for personal information management. Articles about Org mode almost always make the point that Org documents are plain text and can be edited with any editor. That’s true and it’s part of what gives Org its power.

On the other hand, just because you can edit Org mode documents with any editor doesn’t mean you should or would. Who, other than in an emergency, would do such a thing¹? One reason not to do so is, of course, that Org mode runs in the Emacs lisp interpreter so you can’t get agendas, generate reports, use the spreadsheet functionality, or a host of other things in other editors.

A more subtle reason, though, is that the Org language is integrated with the Emacs editor. Alex Beal explores this integration in an interesting post over at his blog usr/bin/blog. The way you deal with Org structures and operate on the data is deeply integrated into Emacs. One of the examples he gives is editing tables. You can, of course, build an Org table in any editor but the Emacs editor will automatically format them for you and allow operations such as adding, deleting, or moving rows or columns in an easy way.

Beal argues that this integration is very valuable and is something missing in most languages. Emacs does, of course, provide minor modes that do some of this integration but not as much as with Org mode. It’s an interesting and thoughtful post that’s worth reading.

Karl Voit has a lovely paean to Org mode in which he recounts his journey to Org in a years-long quest to organize his life and maintain a knowledge database. I’m sympathetic. I started with a Rolodex and a pocket full of index cards. Years later I find myself, like Voit, spending the majority of my tube time in Org mode.

Voit is an expert on personal information managers and has spend a considerable amount of time building up his work environment. He suggests an often proffered but frequently ignored piece of advice for using Org mode: start off with one or two simple functions—note taking, say—and add more functionality as the need arrives. Bernt Hansen’s excellent Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! is an excellent place to see what Org can do. It’s short enough the read the whole thing but comprehensive enough to show you what’s possible and to serve as a go-by for implementing your own workflow.

As Voit says, one of the major benefits of Org—besides its power—is that the data format is plain text. You can, if you like or need to for some reason, write an Org document with any editor, even echo if it comes to that. That’s a huge advantage because it means you don’t have to worry about being locked into proprietary data formats that might stop being supported sometime in the future. That’s one of the main reasons I feel comfortable living in the Apple ecosystem: all my data (other than specialized data such as pictures and PDFs, which are also in open source formats) are plain text so if I have to leave Apple for some reason, I can take all my data with me. I largely have Org to thank for this.

If you’re an Org user or wondering if you should be, take a look at Voit’s post. It’s an interesting read.

An exception to my all-things-in-Emacs rule is my calendar. I do keep an Org mode agenda for things like projects and tasks to be done but for doctor’s appointments and the like I use the the macOS calendar app—actually Fantastical but that’s a detail. I do that because it makes my calendar easily available on all my devices. When I’m at, say, the doctor’s and am making an appointment for my next physical, it’s nice to be able to bring my calendar up on my iPhone so I can see what days and times are free.

Not everyone does things like me of course. Lots of folks keep their calendar in Org mode and for them there is a need for alerts of upcoming events in the agenda. Happily, Artem Khramov has met that need with org-wild-notifier.el. Take a look at the README to see the what sort of alerting it can do.

If you use Org for your calendar and you like to get alerts a few minutes before meetings or appointments, you should take a look at org-wild-notifier. It a reasonably light-weight solution that will probably serve your needs.