Always heard about org mode but was intimidated by emacs when I could barely manage vi/vim (sorry guys). Installed a plugin for org-mode for Sublime Text today and… shit, why didn’t I try this sooner?
I have thousands of text files with horrible organization, thrown around multiple directories, no common naming scheme, no hierarchy, no unified notation, just ramblings and a barely marginal attempt at organization using === as title markers. I have links and ideas buried deep and I didn’t want to use a third party tool “just for managing text”.
Well, my eyes are open, and thus I’m euphoric, enlightened by its brilliance. I must rewrite all my stuff in org-mode.
Welcome to emacs, you’re here forever.
Actually I left 🫣🫣 After using it for a few years. I couldn’t get a hang of it on Android, and I ended up switching to caldav for tasks and markdown for notes.
Currently testing out https://silverbullet.md
I did enjoy orgmode for a long time, but I got too old for init.el …
I use org mode extensively, and yeah, gotta admit it’s nice.
My biggest gripe is the amount of typing it still takes to annotate stuff. I often find it hard to keep up e.g. taking live notes in a class settings.
For instance, starting a new document and typing:
#+BEGIN_TITLE Class XYZ Notes #+END_TITLEThen later on I wanna insert a code segment, and, gotta:
#+BEGIN_SRC javascript $var = "ooh, cool code, bro."; #+END_SRC(yeah, C-c C-, s works, but I gotta remember that exists, and then also ewww generates in lowercase – uppercase that shortcut output!)
And then I find I want a table, so lots of "|"s
There’s probably better faster shortcuts for lots of this, but like everything in emacs, it’s finding and learning them. Typically I need some downtime to do that, which doesn’t happen if I’m e.g. trying to take notes quickly.
Anyway, despite this, I gotta agree org mode is really helpful. Happying org’ing to you!
– Pat
You can do #+TITLE: titletext instead for titles at least, also I guess the table stuff is reasons to do emacs because you only need to do the first | and then pressing tab/enter like excel does the rest
You can use yasnippet or tempel with tempel-collections to create blocks from templates without having to write them all by yourself (https://github.com/mattiasdrp/pokemacs/blob/main/init.org#tempel for example)
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Thanks for the encouragement. I suppose I can make a macro or a temporary marker to replace them for proper syntax like you described when I’m in a hurry? I first have to transform some of the notes I’m using to org-mode syntax first so I can get used to this.
Reading the docs it feels close to markdown, but most markdown implementations have a much simpler format for code blocks with syntax specified:
```javascript
$var = “ooh, cool code, bro.”;
```Will turn into:
$var = "ooh, cool code, bro.";(Though lemmy-ui doesn’t seem to support syntax highlighting.)
For the tables you can do ‘M-x org-table-create’ which then asks you for dimensions and makes it for you.
I think org-capture might help you with the other stuff, you can set up templates and access them by pressing ‘C-c c’ and get it all inserted in whatever org file and under whatever heading you want.
Org mode changed my fucking life! I looked into using emacs as a simple markdown editor when I was doing a creative writing course and discovered org mode. 4 years later and I never leave emacs, everything is done through emacs and org mode. I even use it as my window manager (exwm). I bought an old chromebook to turn into an emacs machine and it’s so good. It’s an operating system and I don’t like using a computer without it.
Some things for you to look into that I now can’t live without:
Elfeed
Org-capture and capture templates
Dired
EXWM
Syncthing (not a part of emacs but means I don’t have to use closed source cloud backups)
I passionately love emacs. At first I thought all they shortcuts and keybindings were a bit insane but they are second nature to me at this point. Emacs has also saved me lots of money that I would have spent on silly writing apps and aids.
There used to be an awesome vi tutorial page at the University of Hawaii but it’s no longer there. You might find it archived on the internet archive way back though.
There’s also the game to help learn vim.
Huh! That’s pretty cool. I’ve bookmarked the site to check it out later. Thanks!
Full disclosure, I think you have to pay to get past like the second level.
That’s the one! I learned vi with that website. Turned me into a big fan.
Just out of curiosity, do you know of a good resource for learning awk, sed, and grep?
There are two really good O’Reilly books: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sed-awk/1565922255/ and https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-regular-expressions/0596528124/ (regex in general)
– not sure if these are still available as standalone pdfs; but back in the day I worked through them in part, and they were extremely helpful.
I think that’s the one.
Many thanks, will check that one.
What?
You’re getting downvotes, but I also have no idea what’s going on in this post.
You could have just done a little search https://orgmode.org/
