Irreal

I’ve been a long time fan of Eric Fraga’s quiet work in the Emacs sphere. He an academic who, as far as I know, doesn’t work directly on Emacs development but is nevertheless active in the community making suggestions and answering questions. If you check the Emacs Devel list or the Org Mode Devel list, you’ll see his name all over the place. He’s even stopped by Irreal a couple of times.

I was, therefore, delighted to see that he had make a contribution to Greg Newman’s Emacs Carnival Writing Experience. His experiences are worth listening to because he has been using Emacs and Org mode to write his technical papers for a long time. He works in process systems engineering so he can get away without having to make his submissions in the format whose name must not be mentioned.

His Emacs Carnival contribution discusses some of the advantages of using Emacs/Org mode for writing his papers. Those include the usual ability of combining code and prose in the same file, having the code be executable, and having it modify the prose in the file. He leverages that ability to generate diagrams and graphs directly from data in the paper. That’s a real win because the diagrams and graphs always reflect the data in the paper and don’t get out of sync.

Another example of the power of Emacs that he gives is almost trivial but vastly underrated: abbreviations. If there are words that you use all the time—especially long words or words that are difficult to spell—this can be a real time saver. See Fraga’s post for an example.

I’m really enjoying the Emacs Carnival Writing Experience and was glad to see Fraga share his views.

The Emacs Cat, like me, is a heavy Org mode user. He uses it for note taking, maintaining his personal knowledge base, agenda management, and blogging. He recently decided to share his org mode configuration. It’s worth taking a look at.

The thing about Org mode is that it’s a huge app with lots of functionality and plenty of knobs that can be tuned to make it behave exactly as you want it to. So even if you’re a heavy user, it’s very possible that there’s a knob that you didn’t know about that will improve your workflow.

One way of discovering those knobs—and other functionality—is to read other people’s configurations. That’s why The Cat’s sharing of his configuration is so useful. It let’s us discover things that we didn’t know about that might be useful in our own workflows.

For example, there’s a variable, org-return-follows-link, that enables clicking on a link to open it in your browser. I generally use org-open-at-point, bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+o, for this. It’s a bit more general but it’s still nice to have another, simple way of following a link.

There are a lot of nice suggestions in the Cat’s configuration so it’s definitely worth your while to spend a couple of minutes reading it.

The minions, of course, are upset and jumping up and down about his use of a dark theme but, minions aside, Irreal is willing to let folks use whatever themes they like. Even if the minions are right

As you all know, I’m a huge Org Mode fan but Álvaro Ramírez’s use and customization of it dwarfs mine. Yesterday, I wrote about how Ramírez was an expert at finding solutions to small problems and that those solutions can payoff by reducing some of the friction in our day-to-day chores.

In his latest post, Ramírez demonstrates this again by recounting how his use of Org Mode has evolved over the last decade. He started as many of us suggest: he chose a single task to automate with Org. That was making technical notes for his own use. But then he wanted to be able to access those from his iPhone when he was away from his computer. His solution was to simply export them to HTML—thereby learning another bit of Org Mode—and publish them so that he could access them from anywhere. He described it as accidentally falling into blogging. He’s still using the same (large) file for everything he publishes to the Web.

From there, his Org use continued to grow. Many of the apps that we associate with Ramírez actually grew out of his Org mode use. His post is fairly long and describes all this. Even his wonderful app, Journelly, grew out of his desire to integrate Org mode with his iPhone and its portability.

A lot of Ramírez’s work is available for download or purchase but perhaps the most important thing is seeing how he solved one small problem after another until he’d built up a powerful system for handling his data. If you’re an Org user or want to be one, you should definitely take a few minutes to read his post.

Chris Maiorana has another post on streamlining your writing. I like his posts because he’s an actual writer and we can be sure that the things he recommends actually work, at least for him. His latest post is a list of specific functions and packages to make your writing easier.

I especially liked his first suggestion. I often end a sentence with a period and then realize that it’s a question and should end in a question mark. It’s easy enough to fix this of course but Maiorana offers a better way. If the point is on a punctuation mark and you type a different punctuation mark, the new mark will replace the old one.

You’d have to use this function a lot of times to amortize the time spent installing it but that’s not the point. The point is that it help to reduce your writing friction and keep you in the flow.

His next function is also something you might want if you’re writing in Org mode. It’s important for writers to have a (reasonably) accurate word count. Maiorana has a word count function specialized for Org that ignores lines beginning with # or *. I have a function like this that I wrote for Troff files when I was writing in Troff but never wrote one for Org. If for some reason I really need an accurate count I just do the same thing with a grep-wc pipeline. Still, if you write a lot in Org, this is a useful function to have.

Maiorana recommends a bunch of other functions/packages in his post so if you’re regularly writing in Org mode (or even just Emacs) you should definitely take a look at his post. There’s a lot a good suggestions in it.

The latest addition to the Emacs Carnival on Writing Experience is from Eric MacAdie. He begins by saying that with the exception of source code, he hardly ever writes plain text files anymore, only Org files. I realized, when I read that, that it also applies to me. Even when I’m just taking a quick note, it starts out as an Org file and may later be fleshed out to be a full fledged Org file but even if it’s not, it’s an org file with all the formatting and structure that implies.

MacAdie does the same thing although he sometimes starts with a paper note. We here in the Irreal Bunker long ago gave up the use of such primitive tools but the idea is the same: capture an embryonic idea and flesh it out as your understanding ripens.

MacAdie also uses Org to publish his blog posts about the EmacsATX meetings but his workflow is considerably different from mine. It’s another demonstration of how Emacs and Org mode can adjust themselves to suit your individual requirements.

Take a look at his post to see one way to leverage Emacs and Org for your writing. It probably won’t match your needs exactly but you might get some ideas.