Irreal

Daniel Mai has a nice video on how he uses Org mode to organize his Emacs init file. I’ve written about this before but some of you may prefer, or at least enjoy, watching a video on the subject.

This appears to be the first of several videos on the subject so Mai restricts himself to showing how he organizes the Org file and how he uses the use-package package to install and configure his packages. He promises to go into some of the details in future videos.

If you’ve reached the point where you’re thinking, “I really should refactor my init file” you should consider organizing it as an Org file. Doing that makes it easy to add commentary on why your doing things a particular way or what a custom function is for. One of the big benefits, I think, is that Org mode’s outline paradigm makes it natural to organize your init file in a reasonable way. That, in turn, makes it easy to find things either by just looking at the headings or using one of the excellent Org mode search functions.

In any event, the video is enjoyable and only 12 minutes long so it should be easy to fit it into your schedule.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork), who’s been posting several great articles lately, has a nice offering with A few org-agenda hacks. It’s a short list of some of the ways he’s tweaked Org’s agenda view to better suit his needs.

As Borkowski says, all of this is in the documentation but may be a bit hard to dig out. If you use even one of his tips it will have been worth reading this short but pithy post.

The ever awesome Sacha Chua has an excellent Baby Steps Guide to Managing Your Tasks with Org. It’s still a work in progress but even in its unfinished state it’s a really useful guide for getting started with Org mode.

One of problems with Org is that it can be overwhelming. Org can do so much and has so many facets that it’s easy for beginners to bog down trying to understand everything. Chua’s guide takes the approach of learning to do just one thing with Org: manage your TODO lists. By the time you’re finished mastering that, you will have learned enough about Org and how it works that it will be easy to move on to the next set of Org features.

Chua starts off by having you create a list of tasks and shows how you can manipulate that list by moving tasks up and down in the file. When you’re done she says to change the TODO to a DONE. That’s kind of a bore, though, so she shows you how to toggle it with a simple key sequence. But maybe you want more states than just TODO and DONE. You might want WAITING or SOMEDAY, for example. Chua shows you how to add these and assign speed keys to them so you can switch states easily.

Next she suggests that you break that list of tasks up into projects. That makes it a bit easier to organize your tasks and track progress on individual projects. Finally, she shows you how to schedule tasks for a certain date.

If you’ve been wanting to get started with Org, Chua’s tutorial is an almost painless way of getting started and learning to use Org for a useful task at the same time. Definitely recommended.