Irreal

Karl Voit has a nice bit of Elisp that makes it easy for him to set Org mode properties. He maintains his contacts in an Org file that (presumably) has the contact names in the headings and details, such as phone numbers, as Org properties associated with each heading. When a phone number changes, he makes note of that in the heading but also wants to update the phone number property.

He does that by highlighting the phone number on the headline and calling his code, which asks him which property he wants to change. He gets a list from which he can select and the highlighted region is set to the value of that property.

If you have a use case similar to Voit’s, take a look at his code. It may make your workflow easier.

A Christmas present from Bastien

#emacs #orgmode 9.0.3 – a bugfix release – is out. Enjoy and merry christmas!

— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) December 24, 2016

Rainer König has the latest video up in his OrgMode tutorial series. This time he discusses his personal Org mode file structure and workflow. I always find it interesting to see how others do these sorts of thing so I really enjoyed his video.

The video is about 21 and a half minutes so you may have to schedule some time to watch it.

John Kitchin has a nice post that illustrates how to install context sensitive speed keys for Org mode headings. I didn’t know a framework for this existed so I found his article interesting and informative.

The particular problem he is solving is extracting an email address from an Org file of contacts and opening an email buffer so that he can send an email to the contact. He also has keys for copying the address to clipboard in various ways. That’s interesting and many will find it useful for their own work but the real value, I think, is explaining how you go about installing speed keys for Org mode.

Take a look at his code for the details. It’s pretty simple if you know a bit of Elisp. He also shows how to retrieve a property from an Org mode entry so there’s a lot to learn from his code.

After a hiatus of almost 4 months, Rainer König is back with another video in his excellent series of Org Mode Tutorials. If you haven’t been following along, be sure to click on the above link to the play list. There’s a ton of useful information in those (31) videos.

The latest video deals with bulk actions. The idea is that if you have an Org mode agenda up, you can mark some of the entries and then perform an action on them all at once. That’s much easier than repeating the same action multiple times. König’s example is archiving all the completed TODO items in his agenda.

I have a similar use case. Periodically, I bring up an agenda list of all the items in my blog ideas queue that I haven’t acted on. Usually they’re items that I decided weren’t interesting enough to write about or that had become too dated. I mark the ones I want to get rid of and then do a bulk cancel on them. They’re still in my blog ideas file, of course, but they no longer come up in the list of pending ideas.

The latest video is about 12 and a half minutes so it should be easy to schedule. Again, if you haven’t been following König’s tutorials, head on over to his play list and start going through them. They are the best resource I know for learning about Org mode.

One of the nice features of the Org Mode agenda is that it lists the file the agenda item came from at the left of each item. That makes it easy to see what the item is about. For instance, if I see “b-ideas,” I know that this entry is an idea for a blog post.

Sacha Chua passes on a tip from D.C. Toedt from which I learned something new. It turns out that having the file name appear at the left of the agenda item is merely the default. By using the CATEGORY property in the top-level headline you can change what appears in the agenda. As Chua notes, this is great if you like to keep everything in a single file.

Having the name of your single Org file appear in each agenda item is not very helpful but by using Toedt’s tip you can easily arrange for useful information to be put there. When you read Chua’s post, be sure to follow the link to her configuration to see how she breaks out the various categories of her agenda items.

Karl Voit has an excellent post on he handles dependencies between Org mode tasks. The post is reminiscent of his chat with Sacha Chua in which he explains how he uses yasnippet to automate complex workflows. I wrote about that chat here.

As in the chat, he gives the example of his workflow for organizing trips to the local cabaret with his friends. You might not think that that demands an “advanced workflow” but, in fact, his setup is quite sophisticated. Blocked tasks don’t appear in his agenda until they are able to be worked on. His templates use the advanced features of yasnippet which adds to the sophistication of his workflow.

Another nice process he describes is using the yankpad package to handle his snippets. Although yankpad was intended as a simple way of configuring short text replacement snippets, it will also works with yasnippet so you can define and manage your snippets from an Org file instead of separate files as with yasnippet. See Voit’s post for a bit more on this.

If you’re a power user of Org mode—or want to become one—you should definitely take a look at Voit’s post. You can build amazingly complex workflows by combining some advanced Org mode features with yasnippet.