Irreal

Jeff Terrell has an interesting video up that considers Org mode’s role as an exocortex. By “exocortex” he means (roughly) “memory external to your brain that helps you remember things you don’t need to be thinking about right now.” The idea is to improve your focus by offloading facts that aren’t important to the task at hand.

On the one hand, there’s not really anything new here. Most of us maintain a TODO list to record tasks that need doing but that we aren’t working on right now. By not having to keep those in our active memory, we can improve our focus on the current task. As Terrell says, there are many devices that can serve as an exocortex: a notebook, a calendar app, and the many software implementations of a TODO list.

His video considers why Org mode is a excellent exocortex and he looks at ways to use it for that purpose effectively. Terrell goes over some of the features of Org and shows how they can be used to improve your focus by not having to worry about remembering future tasks. Most of the features he considers are those comprising the agenda and capture functions in Org. He does not, for example, consider Babel or the publishing aspects. One nice feature that he’s configured is the ability to pop up a capture buffer from anywhere in his system. That makes it really easy to capture an idea or task in a low friction way. I have the same thing and use it all the time. It’s hard to overstate how useful it is.

One other point that Terrell mentions is that it’s really handy to be able to carry your exocortex with you and Org’s iOS and Android apps make that possible. He even gives an example of recording things he needs to talk to his wife about and checking his phone at dinner to see what they are.

The video is 14 minutes, 45 seconds long so you can easily fit it into a coffee break. It’s definitely worth while watching, especially if you aren’t already an Org user and are trying to figure out if it could be useful to you.

Last week I wrote Olivier Berger’s tweet pointing at org-entities-help and remarked what a boon it was to me because I can never remember the names of encodings. Yesterday, John Kitchin commented that he has written a bit of code for inserting org-entities (as well as the \(\LaTeX\) or HTML encodings or even the glyph itself). There are two functions: one that works with Helm and another that works with Ivy.

These are really nice because you can use the Helm/Ivy filtering to narrow down to the entity you want. For example, if I want a ‘U’ with an umlaut, I bring up the function, type “uu” and Ivy narrows the choices down to the two entries (capital and lower case) with an umlauted U, Ü. If I just type Return, the UTF glyph is inserted. If I type Meta+o (in Ivy, Helm, presumably, has a similar mechanism) I get a menu that allows me to enter the org-entity, \(\LaTeX\), or HTML encodings.

Unless you’re participating in a discussion, most of you won’t see the comments for a particular post so I’m writing this up separately so that everyone can all take advantage of Kitchin’s excellent contribution.

Oskar Wickström has a nice post on automating the build of your technical presentation. Wickström likes to develop his code examples and diagrams concurrently with the text of the presentation. That means that the code and diagrams can change often as the presentation evolves. His post discusses ways of automating the process—essentially through a make file—so that anything that’s changed gets rebuilt and added to the presentation.

Wickström is not an Org mode user so his process involves Markdown, Pandoc, and Beamer. If you, too, don’t or can’t use Org, his post has some good ideas to make the process smoother.

What struck me, though, was how much easier things are with Org. The code is simply embedded in the document and compiled and run in place, automatically adding its output to the document. Likewise, diagrams and graphs are generated automatically from commands embedded in the source document. Finally, the presentation can be exported to Beamer—that’s what Wickström is using—or perhaps reveal.js. Mike Zamansky has a great video that shows how easy it is to make really nice presentations with Org mode and reveal.js. Everything is in a single Org file so you don’t have to worry about copying the latest code into your source document. It’s a very smooth and easy process.

I’ve been following a tweet discussion between Karl Voit and several others over the relative merits of light weight markup languages. You can get a feel for the arguments by expanding the following:

For #orgmode as a markup (w/o Emacs) the average user will definitely gets a better experience, I bet.

— Karl Voit (@n0v0id) September 19, 2017

Tweets are not, of course, a very good platform for making reasoned arguments about technical issues or anything else for that matter so Voit has pulled his arguments into a blog post in which he make the case that Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Language to Use for Text. As I’ve said many times, I do almost all my writing these days in Org mode so I already agreed with his conclusion but Voit makes a good case for his conclusion.

He looks at several light weight markup languages such as Org mode, Markdown, AsciiDoc, Wikitext, and reStructuredText and identifies how Org is superior to them. He notes that Org is better even without Emacs because you can write it in any editor and use tools like pandoc to get it into whatever final form you need.

Of course, the right tools make all the difference and using Org markup from within Emacs is a real win. Still, even some people who prefer not to use Emacs, write Org markdown in some other editor and convert it using pandoc. Even if you don’t already agree that Org syntax is the best, be sure to read Voit’s post. He’s got some good arguments and may convince you.