Irreal

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.