6 KiB
How I use org-mode
In this article I'll try to give an overview of my current use of org mode. Why write another article about the subjet? First, I only understood the real advantage of using org mode after discovering different usages a few month appart. So it would be nice to explain how to get the best out of org mode and speed up your own discovery.
First, what is org mode? From the main website of org mode:
Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.
That's a quite broad description. So instead of giving all the gory details of my personal workflow. I'll try to give you an idea.
I work most of my using emacs1. Generally the first thing I do in the morning is opening `org-calendar` and this is what I see:
Sunday 20 September 2020
Due Today
inbox: Deadline: TODO [#A] Something Urgent
Today
8:00...... ----------------
10:00...... ----------------
12:00...... ----------------
12:38...... now - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
14:00...... ----------------
inbox: 15:00...... Scheduled: TODO Something to start this afternoon
16:00...... ----------------
inbox: 18:00...... Deadline: TODO Something due this afternoon
18:00...... ----------------
20:00...... ----------------
Due Soon
inbox: In 2 d.: TODO in two days
Habits
inbox: 9:30...... TODO Habit in the morning * *** * * * ** *! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * * ! :
inbox: TODO Habit weekly * * * ! :
Low Priority
inbox: Sched.22x: TODO [#C] fun maybe :fun::
inbox: Sched. 1x: TODO [#C] another thing :fun::
inbox: Sched.63x: IN-PROGRESS [#B] play [1/8] :maybe::
inbox: Sched.26x: IN-PROGRESS thing not done for 26 days :perso::maybe:
Evening Habits
inbox: 21:30...... TODO habit in the evening ! :
inbox: 21:30...... TODO habit in the evening * ! :
inbox: 22:00...... TODO habit in the evening * ! :
I replaced the tasks names by XXX but this is just text.
With colors it looks like this:
So unlike most fancy todo list we are used to, here this look pretty raw. But in my opinion having a brutalist interface is part of why org-mode is great. So this is text oriented and thus distraction free. It goes directly to the essential.
So mainly I see what I planned to do today. I got a few "Due Soon" tasks in case I have the time to handle those today.
When I start working on a task I start a clock on it (I simply type I
when my cursor is on the TODO line)
When I finished some task I change its stats from TODO to something else.
Mainly I'm prompted when doing so:
{ [t] TODO [p] IN-PROGRESS [h] HOLD [w] WAITING
[d] DONE [c] CANCELLED [l] HANDLED }Footnotes
Historically, I coded using different IDEs. Then I worked for a company that forced me to use terrible keyboards and after just a few weeks I started to have serious wrist issues. So to minimize that pain I switched to vim. And it was awesome. Once you're use to the power of vim keybinding forever your soul will bound to them. So learning vim is a bit like learning a new music instrument. You need to construct some muscle memory and integrate one after one new tricks. Once learned your personal editing power start to become overwhelming.
After a few years of vim, I wanted to try to explore new editor tooling. So I switched to emacs using the spacemacs distribution. So mainly it's vim but with even better keybindgs, helpers and within emacs. The main reason for the switch was that vimscript is a really bad language to configure your editor. Emacs use emacs-LISP. For editor customization a LISP looked perfect to me. LISP is still one of the most powerful and easy to use programming language to date.
And recently, as my personal configuration started to grow so much I switched to doom-emacs. I was quite hesitant to do the switch but so far its been a pleasure. IMHO using doom-emacs is a lot better than using my own personal configuration from scratch because I wouldn't be able to end up with so much configuration quality.