Irreal

If you’ve watched any of Howard Abrams’ excellent videos, you may have wondered, as others have, how he gets the nice effects when he displays Org buffers. Wonder no more. Abrams has posted an explanation of how he gets those effects. At the bottom of the post is an example of what the resulting display looks like.

He covers four improvements:

• Hiding emphasis markers
  Instead of seeing /this is italics/, for example, you just see this is italics.
• Better bullets
  In lists like this one, Org usually just uses ASCII characters for bullets. Abrams shows how to replace that with the more appropriate • character.
• Better header bullets
  This change replaces the series of stars that mark headers with bullets of various sorts. This optimization requires the org-bullets package.
• Better headers
  In this tip, Abrams shows how to have different sizes for the various levels of headers.

Of course, when you export an Org buffer most of these changes happen automatically so they’re mostly useful if you are using screen captures in a video or just want to have nicer looking Org buffers.

UPDATE [2016-04-12 Tue 13:08]: Karl Voit points to another excellent resource along the same lines.

Abo-abo has a great post that demonstrates a hydra for the Org Agenda view menu. Instead of the ugly static menu, you get a beautiful hydra that shows you the state of the toggles and other information.

It’s that last bit that’s significant here. Hydra has a new extended doc syntax that allows you to dynamically add status items to a hydra menu. For example, in the Agenda view you can see things by day, week, fortnight, month, or year. The hydra includes code that puts a check box next to the chosen display mode. It also displays the status of the toggles such as org-agenda-follow-mode.

If, like me, you use agenda views a lot, you may find this hydra useful. Take a look at abo-abo’s post to see what it looks like and what it can do. You may also want to make use of the extended doc syntax in some of your other hydras. If you don’t have the hydra package installed, you should consider it. There’s a video that shows the basic capabilities but abo-abo has added more to the package since he made the video. Again, I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t already.

If, like me, you use Org mode for your note taking and record keeping, you’ve probably found yourself occasionally needing to capture data from a Web page. You can already to that but many browsers don’t handle the conversion from HTML to text very well.

Alphapapa has an interesting solution in the org-protocol-capture-html package. The README.org page shows the result of capturing one of John Kitchin’s pages. It looks pretty nice and even turned a table into its Org equivalent.

I’m not sure how universal the solution is. Part of the requirements is a bookmarklet for the browser. Alphapapa gives examples for Firefox and Chrome but nothing for I.E. or Safari. It probably wouldn’t be very hard to get it working for those browsers too but I haven’t looked into the problem.

Sadly, there isn’t an ELPA package so you have to install it yourself. Of course, that isn’t hard but it does make it harder to keep things up to date. This package seems like a useful addition to Emacs if you often have a need to capture Web pages to Org mode.