{"id":1313,"date":"2018-08-11T11:53:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-11T18:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2018-08-12T16:31:13","modified_gmt":"2018-08-12T23:31:13","slug":"emacs-and-org-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/1313","title":{"rendered":"Emacs and Org-mode"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Well this is odd.  I&#8217;ve returned to a text editor I was introduced to in university, but wasn&#8217;t really taken with until just recently.  The editor is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Emacs\">Emacs<\/a> and the reason is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Org-mode\">org-mode<\/a>.  Apparently, my story is not all that uncommon and org-mode (with evil mode) has even converted many <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vim_(text_editor)\">Vim<\/a> users. <\/p>\n<p> <i>Emacs<\/i> has been around since 1976.  (<i>Nineteen-seventy-six<\/i>!  And it&#8217;s still actively developed!  That&#8217;s insane!)  <i>Org-mode<\/i> is an Emacs extension (major-mode) that has been in development since 2003 and included in Emacs core since 2006.  Org-mode is basically an everything-mode; it allows for really intuitive outlines and section management, source code blocks, inline evaluation of those blocks and literal programming, comprehensive exporting, intra- and inter-document hyperlinking, tables\/spreadsheets, presentations, &#x2026;.the list goes on, and on, and on.  And on. <\/p>\n<p> The Boston Emacs Meetup has quite a few good Emacs videos with live demonstrations, and I really enjoyed this one, by Harry Schwartz: <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SzA2YODtgK4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p> (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=SzA2YODtgK4\">YouTube: Getting Started With Org Mode<\/a>) <\/p>\n<p> As I continue to migrate <i>all-the-things<\/i> over to Emacs and Org-mode, it made me think about why I didn&#8217;t put more time into learning Emacs before. <\/p>\n<p> When I was introduced to Emacs in university (somewhere around 2002 or 2003), org-mode was not included in Emacs and relatively young.  At that time, Java was being promoted heavily in education, and for programming Java, it makes the most sense to use a Java IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans which make the verbose language far more tolerable.  So that&#8217;s generally what I did.  But for my <code>C<\/code> or <code>C++<\/code> programming, and general text file editing, I usually chose Emacs over Vi(m) due to it being more similar to what I was used to &#8211; <i>but that&#8217;s it<\/i>.  I could move about in Emacs without leaving home-row, and I could make a few basic changes in VIM, save, and quit without panicking<sup><a id=\"fnr.1\" class=\"footref\" href=\"#fn.1\">1<\/a><\/sup>.  I could have been using <a href=\"https:\/\/notepad-plus-plus.org\/\">Notepad++<\/a> and would have been just as happy.  I was not taking advantage of either Emacs or Vim. <\/p>\n<p> I never learned about org-mode until roughly 2 years ago (somewhere between June and August, 2016).  Since then, I&#8217;ve gradually migrated <i>as-much-as-I-fucking-can<\/i> to these wonderful plain text files.  I manage my work projects and todo lists.  My agenda.  My <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/izm\/dotemacs\">emacs config file<\/a>.  My blog(s); this post (via <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/org2blog\/org2blog\">org2blog<\/a>).  I write documentation that can be exported into a variety of formats.  And I <i>keep learning new things<\/i>; both for Emacs and for org-mode.  Just recently, the org-mode <a href=\"https:\/\/orgmode.org\/manual\/The-clock-table.html#The-clock-table\">time tracking<\/a> finally clicked for me.  I now schedule my days better and try to track where my time goes.  This is extremely useful in evaluating what&#8217;s eating up my time, and estimating how long tasks will take so I can plan better. <\/p>\n<div class=\"figure\">\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wordpress\/..\/files\/2018\/08\/2018-08-12_emacs.png?w=750&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"2018-08-12_emacs.png\" \/> <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p> The draw of org-mode has also made me appreciate Emacs, of course.  I connect to <a href=\"http:\/\/jupyter.org\/\">Jupyter notebooks<\/a> via <a href=\"http:\/\/millejoh.github.io\/emacs-ipython-notebook\/\">ein<\/a> and work on them with conveniences not offered in the browser interface<sup><a id=\"fnr.2\" class=\"footref\" href=\"#fn.2\">2<\/a><\/sup>.  I&#8217;ve heavily customized my environment, picked up a bit of elisp, and I&#8217;ve started tweeking my own theme.  I recently moved from primarily using Linux to primarily using Windows, which has presented a few challenges with Emacs&#8217; setup, but it&#8217;s helped me develop a consistent environment between work and home. <\/p>\n<p> Both Emacs and org-mode are powerful but take a significant time investment to configure and use effectively.  <a href=\"http:\/\/spacemacs.org\/\">Spacemacs<\/a>, a distribution of Emacs that comes heavily <i>pre-configured<\/i> and tries to combine the best of Emacs <i>and<\/i> Vim, offers a simple way to see what an advanced setup could look like.  It&#8217;s not how I started, and some consider it too bloated, but it&#8217;s very well put together and certainly worth looking at. <\/p>\n<p> Anyway, I&#8217;ll probably be reviving this blog with the odd org-mode or Emacs post, as that is what I&#8217;m playing with, these days.  But in addition to the video above, a good intro would be Carsten Dominik (org-mode&#8217;s creator) presentation at Google: <\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM\">YouTube: Emacs Org-mode &#8211; a system for note-taking and project planning<\/a> <\/p>\n<div id=\"footnotes\">\n<h2 class=\"footnotes\">Footnotes: <\/h2>\n<div id=\"text-footnotes\">\n<div class=\"footdef\"><sup><a id=\"fn.1\" class=\"footnum\" href=\"#fnr.1\">1<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n<div class=\"footpara\">\n<p class=\"footpara\"> I have a great appreciation for <a href=\"http:\/\/takac.github.io\/2013\/01\/30\/vim-grammar\/\">Vim&#8217;s modal editing and language<\/a>. Tempted to use Evil Mode, but I have enough things on my plate, at the moment.  \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"footdef\"><sup><a id=\"fn.2\" class=\"footnum\" href=\"#fnr.2\">2<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n<div class=\"footpara\">\n<p class=\"footpara\"> I want to investigate moving my Jupyter notebook products to org-mode files under Git, only <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/jkitchin\/ox-ipynb\">exporting<\/a> them to notebooks, when needed&#x2026; but that&#8217;s probably a separate post. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well this is odd. I&#8217;ve returned to a text editor I was introduced to in university, but wasn&#8217;t really taken with until just recently. The editor is Emacs and the reason is org-mode. Apparently, my story is not all that uncommon and org-mode (with evil mode) has even converted many Vim users. Emacs has been&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/1313\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Emacs and Org-mode<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[120,250,251,253],"class_list":["post-1313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-blog","tag-emacs","tag-org","tag-vim","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4jEMb-lb","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1313"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1320,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions\/1320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}