Irreal

Aja Hammerly has a post that those trying to decide whether or not Org mode is for them may find useful. Hammerly is a developer advocate for the Google Cloud Platform. As such, she writes tutorials, gives talks, and even writes code. Her post looks at 5 useful Org features that help her prepare her tutorials and talks.

The 5 features that she looks at are

1. Table and Spreadsheets
2. Todos and Checklists
3. Tags
4. Code Blocks
5. The fact that everything is just text

Hammerly is a self-described Org n00b and admits that she isn’t using its full power. Still, just using its outlining and checklist capabilities improves her workflow. If you’re new to Org and trying to decide if it’s worth learning, you should take a look at Hammerly’s post. Among other things, it shows that you can start slowly—indeed, that’s the optimal approach—and learn the more complex features as you need them. As you can see from Hammerly’s post, the features she describes are simple to understand and use.

Later, you’ll probably find yourself using more and more of Org’s capabilities. Eventually, you may find that, like me, you’re using it for the majority of your writing.

I discovered Mike Zamansky’s blog about a year ago when I wrote about his transition to Nikola as a blogging platform. Shortly afterwards, he began his Using Emacs Series. His latest video has, in effect, come full circle as he, once again, looks at blogging with Nikola.

I always enjoy seeing other people’s workflows and particularly their blogging workflows. The video details Zamansky’s efforts to bring the entire blogging workflow under Emacs. After his transition to Nikola, a lot of the workflow was conducted on the command line. His latest improvements involve using Prodigy to manage the non-Emacs part of his workflow. He’s now at the point where virtually everything can be done from within Emacs.

Watching the video makes me appreciate anew the wonderful org2blog/wp that I use for blogging. Everything is completely contained within Emacs; I simply write my post as an Org mode file and call org2blog to post it to my WordPress site. Of course, many folks prefer static pages and don’t want to bother with a heavyweight CMS like WordPress. For them, a solution like Zamansky’s makes a lot of sense. You can do everything from within Emacs and the process is pretty much automated. There are, of course, solutions other than Nikola and I’ve written about some of them but since I don’t use them those posts could only describe what others said about them. If you’d like to start (or switch to) a statically paged blog, Zamansky’s video is a good place to start. The video is 14 minutes long.

I love blogging with org2blog. I write my posts as normal Org documents and org2blog takes care of everything else including renaming and uploading jpegs and things like that.

About a year ago, I started having problems with org2blog dying and hanging Emacs. It turned out that Emacs 25.1 had a small change that meant multibyte characters could no longer be sent by the url-http library, which org2blog uses to upload posts. I don’t have many non-ascii unicode characters in my posts but occasionally I need one for things like accented names and special characters. The most usual case is the em-dash. I can type --- and the blog will get an em-dash but for some reason I don’t understand, the RSS feed will turn that into gibberish. I solved that problem by using the TeX input mode, which inserted a unicode em-dash that worked in both places.

After Emacs 25.1, none of that worked and I had to go to great lengths to get names accented correctly. And, of course, the em-dashes in the RSS feed were broken again. I worked sporadically at fixing things but even though I knew what the problem was I couldn’t get it working. Now Grant Rettke has opened a Pull Request to the xml-rpc library that solves the problem.

If you’re an org2blog user and are having the same problem, you can wait until the patch gets merged or you can simply apply it yourself to xml-rpc.el. It’s only 3 lines so it’s simple to do it by hand. In any event, many thanks to Grant for resolving this problem.

*UPDATE [2017-06-26 Mon]: Grant has posted a copy of the complete file if you want to grab a copy.

Here’s a nice tip from Marco Wahl on protecting line breaks from the fill command in Org mode.

\\ protects breaks from fill (M-q) in #orgmode.

Linebreaks survive fill \\
In Org thanks backslash two times. \\
Somenone starts #Emacs.

— (@mrcwhl) June 20, 2017

If you’re an Org mode user you probably know that Meta+Return can be used to create a new headline, list item, or table field. One minor annoyance is that by default it will split line you’re on at the point, which is almost never what you want. Therefore, I’ve developed the habit of always going to the end of the line before invoking Meta+Return.

Silly me. This is Emacs so of course there’s a way to get the desired behavior: merely set org-M-RET-may-split-line to '((default . nil)) as explained in this Emacs subreddit post.

Actually, you can have finer control by setting it for headlines, list items, or table fields individually. The “default” selection as shown above chooses the result for any not already listed. Check out the org-M-RET-may-split-line variable documentation for details.

It’s not a big thing, of course, but making that change will definitely make my life a bit easier.