Irreal

I learned a really useful Org mode command from Artur Malabarba’s first anniversary post: org-goto. The idea is that you want to navigate to somewhere else in the current Org buffer. You could fold the buffer and navigate to the proper subtree but often you want to leave the current subtree unfolded as well as the subtree you’re navigating to. The org-goto command, bound to 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+j】 by default, allows you to do just that. An copy of the buffer is created with an overlay displaying the buffer in overview mode. You can navigate within that buffer and press 【Return】 on the desired subtree which will take you back to the original buffer with the point at the new subtree.

That may not seem too useful but see Malabarba’s post for a compelling use case. In my case, it’s useful because of the large Org files I use to store my data. When I load such a file via a bookmark or it gets reloaded during a sync from git, it will be completely folded. The files are too large to set them to be completely unfolded so I have to have some way of finding the proper place. I used to call org-sparse-tree and then do a regular expression search for the proper heading. With org-goto, I can simply display the headers, navigate to the desired one, and press 【Return】 to navigate to the proper heading that will be conveniently unfolded. Very handy.

It’s a bit hard to explain how org-goto works so you should experiment with it a bit to see how you can fold it into your workflow. If you use Org files to organize your data as I do, this command is very likely to be a win for you.

UPDATE: There’s a really good discussion of org-goto and related navigation methods in the comments. Be sure to take a look.

I’ve written before (1, 2, 3) about my efforts to implement a system like the one Karl Voit has for managing personal data. Voit uses his Memacs system to automatically collect data from a variety of sources and add them to Org files so that they will appear in his Org agenda. Unfortunately, Memacs was written with the Linux/Android ecosystem in mind so much of it needs a bit work to be usable in the OS X/iOS world.

Nevertheless, many of the ideas (and probably some of the scripts) from Memacs can be used with Org mode on any platform. I keep most of my personal data in 5 Org files: journal, chart (a lightweight quantified self), b-ideas (a queue of ideas and notes for blog posts), todo, and notes. I have capture templates for each of these making it easy to add data. My latest effort to make this data more accessible and useful was to modify the capture templates to add an active time stamp to each entry, causing it to appear in that day’s agenda. For example, here is the capture template for my journal:

("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/journal.org")
         "* %<%R: >%? %^g\n%t")

The %t at the end causes an active date stamp to be added to each journal entry. Thereafter, the headline and tags from the entry will appear in the agenda and selecting that headline will take me directly to the entry.

Here’s an example of one day’s agenda. If I want to know what happened on that day, I can jump directly to it in my agenda to find out. If I want to see where I’ve had dinner, I can bring up all the entries with a tag of dinner. It’s a tremendously powerful system that comes almost for free just by arranging for those active date stamps.

It could be better though. That’s where Memacs comes in. It automatically extracts data from SMS, the Phone’s log, posts, emails, and other data sources. All of the data magically appears in the agenda without having to explicitly capture it. My next step is to adapt some of Voit’s Memacs scripts for my own use.

All this seems pretty geeky but I use the system every day for practical tasks. This morning, for example, I used it to extract data for my tax files. If, as often happens, I find I need to make an update to a blog post, there’s a link to the source file right in the agenda and clicking on it brings up the proper file. As you can see in the example, I also add technical items to my journal. If I need to export an Org file containing citations to docx and don’t remember how, I can search for the docx tag to find the journal entry that contains the details.

Org is tremendously powerful and it pays huge dividends for the effort you expend learning it. One of the nice things about Org is you don’t have to learn everything at once. I keep learning new bits as I find a need for them.