Irreal

Karl Voit has published an instructive post on how to specify recurring events in Org mode. As most of you know, you can annotate an Org TODO entry to specify that it should occur every day, every week, every 3^rd day and other more complex criteria.

Even if you’re familiar with the above, Voit has an alternative method that I wasn’t aware of. That method is org-clone-subtree-with-timeshift that will duplicate the current entry but apply different time stamps. This has some benefits over the more common method. In the first place, if you have a meeting on Tuesday for the next 5 weeks, you can make the first TODO entry and then call org-clone-subtree-with-timeshift with a repeat of 4 and a timeshift of 1w. That gives you the exact number of entries and can edit or delete one or more as necessary. Another benefit is that you can add notes to each entry separately rather than having everything together in a single entry.

Take a look at Voit’s post for the details and more advantages of this method. It’s also a nice summary of how you can specify dates and times whether or not they’re recurring.

Gregory J Stein, an MIT Ph.D student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has an interesting post on how he uses Org mode and the agenda to organize his projects and daily tasks. Like all graduate students, he leads a busy life so seeing how he leverages Org mode in his workflow is interesting and instructive.

Like me, Stein uses his agenda as a journal of what he’s done on a given day as well as keeping track of tasks that need to be done. Part of that is a fairly rigorous use of clocking to track his time. While that’s mostly a matter of developing the right habit patterns, he also has Org set up to automate it as much as possible.

One interesting strategy is his use of the MEETING keyword for his agenda. That keyword is used for scheduling meetings, of course, but he also uses it if some drops by his desk while he’s working. He has a capture template for meeting that automatically stops the clock on his current task and resumes it when the “meeting” is over. That’s a nice way of handling interruptions to your timed tasks. You could, of course, just stop the clock manually but if you’re like me you’ll almost never remember to do that so Stein’s method is a win.

There’s some other useful ideas in the post so you should be sure to give it a read. He also has a link to his configuration so you can see the details of how he set up his environment.

Here’s a useful public service announcement from Sacha Chua:

Need to troubleshoot Org Mode publishing, such as broken links? Org 9 has org-lint. Handy!

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) January 10, 2017

If you live in the Apple world and are an Org mode user, here a bit of good news. The iOS MobileOrg maintainer has announced that he and others are resurrecting the iOS Mobile Org app.

I keep seeing queries on Twitter and elsewhere asking about Org on iPhones and lamenting that MobileOrg appeared to be dead. Those folks can join me in rejoicing that there’s some movement in the project. If you’re interested in what MobileOrg can do, here’s a link to the MobileOrg Github page.

On Tuesday, I wrote about my discovery of org-next-link and how it quickly became my go to method of navigating to Org links. Today, my target link was before the point and it suddenly dawned on me that there was probably an org-previous-link and that it would be mapped to Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+p. That turned out to be true, of course, so I’m passing it on in case there are one or two other folks out there to whom this is not immediately obvious.

Again, if you often have the need to navigate to Org links it’s worth internalizing the shortcuts. It’s amazing how much faster it’s made my moving around in Org documents.