Beginning to see the light with org-mode

Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Apr 10, 2016 at 08:20 AM

I have continued to learn, play with and refine Org-Mode. While it’s frustrating in many ways, once I’d wrestled it into submission, I found it’s pretty much the outliner I’ve been looking for all this time.

It just requires dealing with some issues, like figuring out that “M-x” means “Push Alt-X” and where the Home directory is on a Windows PC. And being willing to edit the .Emacs file. Oh and the keyboard shortcuts, all those bindings that were created for 1970s era keyboards without arrow keys that for some reason are still the defaults…but that can be fixed!

I’ve also spent some time with the repackaged version of GrandView that was posted here and while it’s still a good program, I’ve been able to replicate nearly every feature in Org-Mode.

In fact, I think Org-Mode’s “Refile” function is actually more pleasant to use than GrandView’s “Mark and Gather,” though it doesn’t allow you to move multiple items at the same time.

Though, it takes a few add-ons to really get to where it’s pleasant. Plugging into Melpa (http://melpa.org/#/) is a must as this gives you access to more than 3,000 packages. The main one that I find makes the experience better is one called Helm, which provides a nicer interface for doing things, though I think it does slow Emacs down a little.

There are also add-ons for the add-on like Helm-Swoop, which I found to be so much better for searching I’ve bound it to Ctrl-F. Also, Helm-Flyspell-Correct to make spellchecking much easier.

There’s also Olivetti Mode which gives you better margins for writing, WC-Goal-Mode which provides the always helpful word count in the status bar and Org-Bullets which lets you change the bullets in Org-Mode to whatever symbol you want instead of the asterisks.

Only one symbol allowed though. I couldn’t replicate the Roman numerals from GrandView.

Though, I think the biggest thing that made all the customizations I felt necessary to make Org-Mode usable for me was a package called “Use-Package,” which makes it much easier to deal with all the other packages, as well as making it easy to customize keybindings to be saner than what most Emacs packages use by default.

Though, there’s still the issue of writing LISP and running into issues like,“Why did all my keybindings just break? Oh, I had one parenthesis too many.”

I think one of the biggest reasons to use Org-Mode over “antique software” (though, Emacs itself probably qualifies for that description) is the enthusiastic community. Web apps shut down and take the ability to use the app with them. Other desktop software stagnates and one day an OS update renders it unusable without some kind of emulator. Org-Mode isn’t going anywhere.

For the all the quirks that come with using an Emacs mode for writing, there’s an incredible amount of resources available to help, (The main ones that helped me were http://ergoemacs.org/ and http://sachachua.com/blog/) along with a lot of helpful people.

At one point, I was wondering if something was possible using Org-Mode and asked about it on StackOverflow and within an hour, someone had posted the code for a function that does exactly what I described. I just had to provide my own keyboard shortcut.