Emacs is my favourite editor, having imprinted on it way back in 1984 as my first editor on a Unix system. Emacs’s Org mode is something I’ve heard of, but have never gotten around to learning and using. I’m taking some time now to delve into it, after upgrading my system to version 24.4 of emacs, and using the emacs starter kit to initialize my emacs introduced me to settings.org in the .emacs.d/<user> directory for doing local initialization (that used to get handled with ~/.emacs).

Within the settings.org file, snippets of ELisp code are written, then extracted into settings.el to execute at startup. I found it the most delicious of programming experiences, intermingling a nice outline and documentation with executable code.

Delving further, I’ve discovered Sacha CHua’s blog, and the Org mode website, and all sorts of information on using org-mode in so many areas.

Today’s Explorations

Capture mode

Capture mode is part of org-mode that lets you specify templates for things to capture, a bit different than using [yasnippets], but it’s really useful for capturing todo items, links, snippets of text, and so on. It’s inordinately powerful, and I’ve barely scraped the surface.

With capture templates, you have a whole range of options and things you capture along with what ever you’re capturing, or even just use as a trigger to log an event, which is pretty awesome. Your triggers can be used to send captured things and bits to different files, even, so I have one that records new to do items to a generic GTD inbox file, another that records links in my general notes file, and another to capture a quote into a quotes file.

Other places visited today in the hunt :)

Future Plans

  • Integrating Org-mode with blogging (jekyll)
  • Using literate programming
  • Tracking things like glucose readings, insulin dosages, medications, meals/calories, etc.
  • Getting Things Done ™ – to do / task list management
  • General writing
  • Taking notes
  • Capturing things
  • Linking to other parts of my computer life