Irreal

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.

Chris Maiorana has a post that discusses his thoughts on Org Agenda. His discussion is mainly why you might want to use it and what you’d want to use it for. The main takeaway from his post is that Org Agenda is very flexible and customizable.

You can decide what information you want displayed in the agenda and how you want it displayed. Maiorana lists some of the ways you might want to use the Agenda or, perhaps, not use it all.

Not a bit of it resonated with me. I’ve always simply thought of the Agenda as a list of those headings in certain Org files that have an active date. The traditional way of using it is to have a TODO file or a set of files with TODO items and have those—along with their scheduled and end dates—displayed in the Agenda. I do that too but mostly I use Agenda as a report.

As I’ve mentioned before, I keep a detailed list of my daily activities and these are displayed in the Agenda. This turns out to be useful for more than just taking trips down memory lane. For example, when I have an external appointment, I record when I leave, when I arrive, when I leave the appointment, and when I get back. That way, the next time I have an appointment at the same place, I have an idea of the travel time—and therefore when to leave—and how long it will take to get back. It’s useful information to have and well worth the effort to collect it.

Of course, that’s just one way to use the Agenda and almost certainly not the most common way. But that’s the point: you can mold the agenda to be anything you want.