Emacs

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package. I only discovered his package a month or so ago and I’ve used it daily since. Put a URL in the clipboard, then in an Org-document run M-x org-web-tools-insert-web-page-as-entry and bam!, the page is converted into Org’s format and inserted as a heading in the current file. For example, here’s Jason Velazquez’s post about Blogging Platforms, all tucked away nicely in my “Blogging Platforms” Denote note… ...

It shouldn’t take so much time to keep my stuff running smoothly.

Could I too start storing things as email and find them later using Notmuch?

Many of my TODO items in Org-mode include a SCHEDULED property, which lets me ignore them until a specified date in the future. This keeps my Org agenda nice and tidy. Something that always bugged me is that this worked fine in the Agenda, but not the global TODO list. It finally bothered me enough that I went looking for a solution, which I found in like twenty seconds: ...

I’ll probably continue using Org-journal no matter what

I’ve succumbed to the temptation to try building my Emacs config from scratch. We’ve been here before.

Today I learned that I can use tags in Org files as a filter for org-refile-targets. My refile targets are mapped to org-agenda-files but limit them to only top-level headings in order to keep the list under control. Once in a while, though, I would like to make a more deeply nested heading available for refiling. I can do this by using (:tag . "refile"). Who knew?! (setq org-refile-targets '((org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1) (org-agenda-files :tag . "refile"))) ...

There are some great tools for bringing web content into Markdown files, but few that offer the same utility for Org-mode (Orgdown) files. For example, I use Markdownload extension all the time. It works great with nearly every site I use it on, but instead of Markdown, I’d prefer having Org syntax, so I’ve worked around it by creating a function1 which converts the current region from Markdown to Org. ...

I’ve recently switched from using Org-roam to using Denote for my notes. Org-roam is powerful and cool, but I prefer the more straightforward approach of Denote. I keep all my notes in Denote, including notes about current projects. For example, we’re planning to remodel our kitchen. This is a project and so I have a Denote file named “20221130T130143–kitchen-remodel-2023__house_project.org”. In this file, I keep a list of TODOs. In order to see these TODOs in my Org Agenda, I need to add the file to org-agenda-files. This can be done a few ways, but all are manual. I am forgetful, so I wanted a more automated way to keep my org-agenda-files up to date with Denote projects. ...

You’ll notice that I highlight short phrases in many of my daily post entries here. I think this makes it easier to scan things later. The HTML markup for this is just a styled <mark> tag wrapping the text to be highlighted. I write my posts in Org-mode and convert them to Hugo-compatible Markdown using ox-hugo. The path from Org-mode to HTML for this is a little convoluted, so I cheat and use a macro to generate the markup. ...

I’ve kept a list of books I’ve read as a plain text (well, technically, Markdown) file for years. I wrote about it here. The public version is rendered using Github Pages at books.baty.net. This is fine, but at some point last year I also started logging books in an Org mode file, just to see how it felt. It felt pretty good! ...

Org-roam is “A plain-text personal knowledge management system” using Emacs and Org-mode and I put nearly all my notes in there. While it’s easy to find notes in org-roam based on filename, there’s no obvious way to search the contents of notes. Weird, right? ...