Emacs org-mode on The Art Of Not Asking Why

Correcting photo orientation for org-mode in Linux

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:29:09 -0400

Here’s a niche problem: When viewing iPhone-captured photos in org-mode on Linux, they always appear in landscape orientation, even if you took them in portrait.

The reason is that the sensor of the camera on the phone is physically embedded in landscape mode, so all photos are in landscape mode; when you hold the phone in portrait mode (which is how you hold it most of the time), the phone detects that and implements a fix in the EXIF data file. Essentially, a software fix to a hardware design issue.

Since most photos I take are usually in portrait orientation, it means I need to twist my neck and view images at a 90-degree angle when I look at my Journelly entries.

The source of the problem seems to stem from how org-mode interprets EXIF data in the photo: it doesn’t. It relies on other parts of Emacs, which in turn rely on parts of the OS, to do the job. On Linux (at least on Kubuntu, which is what I use these days), those parts don’t handle EXIF orientation information. Why and how, I am not sure, it’s more digging than I have the time for right now… but anyway - there’s a simple fix.

Auto-orient, which is part of ImageMagick’s mogrify tool. And if you use Emacs on Linux, good chance it’s already installed:

This operator reads and resets the EXIF image profile setting ‘Orientation’ and then performs the appropriate 90 degree rotation on the image to orient the image, for correct viewing.

To execute on an image file: mogrify -auto-orient <file>.

And because I use Emacs, of course there’s a dwim-shell-command solution:

    (defun jtr/dwim-image-auto-orient ()
      "Auto-orient images based on EXIF data using mogrify."
      (interactive)
      (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
       "Auto-orient images"
       "mogrify -auto-orient '<<f>>'"
       :utils "mogrify"
       :silent-success t))

That last part,:silent-success, closes the empty buffer that pops up after successful execution, as mogrify doesn’t really produce an output window. So, it will just bring us back to Dired.

Installing Harper on Kubuntu: The Right Way. Maybe.

Sun, 31 May 2026 18:41:31 -0400

I recently installed Harper on my Linux Desktop to work with Emacs, but since I’m running Kubuntu, I ran into difficulties. In short, there’s no Flatpak or Apt option when it comes to Harper.

After a few interesting changes to the way I journal in Emacs (this is something I hope to discuss soon), I decided to go for the full version, and that meant installing Rust and Cargo.

This was another “programming quest” I didn’t know how to start in the past. I used Claude.ai to guide me, but as usual, I asked a million questions about everything, so I can explain it again here (this is my test to myself). So if you’re new to all of this like I am, take the explanations with a grain of salt, and if you’re an experienced developer who understands Rust (and curl, for that matter) feel free to reach out and educate me further.

Alright, here we go:

To install Rust and Cargo with it:

    curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

The above is a bit more complex than what’s in Cargo’s documentation, but based on a quick search, it is what’s directly recommended in rustup, which is where you install Rust. The idea is the same as other curl installations, with a few more options for added security and to ensure we’re getting what we really want:

Run curl, but restrict it only to https (no http):

curl --proto '=https'

Somewhat redundant: curl will usually refuse anything lower than 1.2 by default. This forces TLS 1.2 as the minimum. This is good practice and also what they tell us to use, so why not:

--tlsv1.2

options for silent mode s (so don’t show us progress and status), but show us if we get errors S, and if we get a 404 error or similar, just stop silently f (otherwise it will pipe it into the sh command at the end):

-sSf

Then we have the URL to download from:

https://sh.rustup.rs

and finally we pipe it | into a shell sh command so it runs as a script as intended here. If you go to the above URL directly, it will download a shell script - so this is how we get it and run it in one go:

| sh

Because we’re about to run commands for Rust, it’s a good idea to add it to our source environment, the same as editing ~/.bashrc manually and adding . "$HOME/.cargo/env". Without it, we’ll have to specify where Cargo is installed for the next commands

    source ~/.bashrc

At first, I installed what was available on crates.io. Crates, as I learned, is the official repository for Cargo, our “app store” for Rust, (or Elpa for Emacs). The individual packages are called “crates”. Makes sense now, but before it all looked like a bunch of command-line voodoo to me.

However, apperently what’s available on Crates is not up to snuff. The official repository for Harper is at https://github.com/Automattic/harper, and it specifies version 2.3.1, whereas the one available in Crates is 2.0.0. We are still using cargo (it’s the “installer” for Rust), but specify to get what we need directly from there:

    cargo install --git https://github.com/Automattic/harper harper-ls --locked

The git option tells Cargo we’re installing directly with git, which is what we’re doing here; the locked option is specified in Harper’s documentation, and upon some research, I learned this forces the exact dependency versions specified in Cargo.lock. Without it, cargo might choose newer dependency versions that were not tested or are not specified in the documentation.

Finally, in Emacs, we want to tell eglot where to find Harper:

    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (add-to-list 'exec-path (expand-file-name "~/.cargo/bin")))

In my case, since I use the same config on my Mac, I want this to run only on Linux. On my Mac, Harper is installed without all these shenanigans directly from Homebrew, which also keeps it up to date. This is added to the same config block I specified in my earlier post. It now looks like this:

            (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
              (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                           '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio"))))
    
             (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                        '(:harper-ls (:dialect "American" :linters (:LongSentences :json-false :AvoidCurses :json-false))))

      ;; Besides choosing American as the language, I also want to ignore long sentences (the main issue is that it hides other errors nested in those), and I also want Harper not to tell me when it thinks something is offensive. I'm a big boy/an old fart. The full list of these options is in https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules. It needs to be nested inside the :linters option.
    
    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (add-to-list 'exec-path (expand-file-name "~/.cargo/bin")))

In the future, when I need to update:

    cargo install --git https://github.com/Automattic/harper harper-ls --locked

Now, Harper works as it should on my Linux Desktop. Another geeky weekend project.

Using Denote for Email: A manual workflow

Tue, 26 May 2026 09:44:27 -0400

As I started to write more emails to other bloggers, the annoyance with macOS’ built-in email client grew. It wasn’t just the fact that it has small text that’s hard on the eyes especially on the harsh white background anymore; it just started to feel restricting.

Emacs is my natural writing environment for longer texts, like blog posts or the kind of emails I end up writing.

I’ve considered mu4e before, but setting it up seems a daunting overkill: the place I would benefit from mu4e is work, but I’m blocked by Microsoft-only 2FA authentication, so I have to stick with Outlook; meanwhile, for the three or so emails I write to other bloggers, it doesn’t require such heavy lifting.

One day about two weeks ago, I just fired up Denote, and suddenly it clicked. Denote, when you invoke it for a new note, asks for a directory - so I created an email directory in my parent Notes folder, and started writing. For a title, I use the subject, and the keyword is reserved for the recipient.

Now my eyes thank me again, as some of these emails can take an hour (and more even) to write. Links are a breeze to include, and quotes - which I use heavily in emails - are just a keyboard press away. It also looks nice when I go to the email directory and see all my drafts there, organized nicely as Denote knows how to do.

Since Denote doesn’t handle emails, for this I simply export the org file to HTML, and then with Dired (which opens in the same directory as the note I’m writing by default), I open the HTML file with my browser. From there, I copy-paste into Apple Mail, which acts as a proofread enhancer with Grammarly going to work there (this is something I’d miss if I were to use mu4e, though I could probably use Harper).

It’s a bit of a manual process, and I do need to delete the HTML files from the email directory every now and then, but for now it’s fine. It’s probably easy enough to create some shortcut that will open these HTML files directly with Mail instead of copy-pasting¹ though.

Footnotes

¹ Opening an HTML file with Dired with ! open -a Mail would make sense, but it opens Mail with the HTML file as an attachment, not as the body of the text.

Journelly and OSM for Emacs are good together

Mon, 25 May 2026 13:55:54 -0400

I mentioned OSM for emacs briefly before, but I haven’t played with it much. That’s because the maps never showed up correctly in the buffer: the map tiles were not aligned correctly and some appeared blank.

As it turns out, someone else had this problem and also found the culprit: visual-line-mode. I have it turned on by default as the majority of my work in Emacs involves org-mode and I need my lines wrapped in the buffer. With visual-line-mode disabled, OSM works as expected, including zooming in and out. Good stuff.

Now that I fixed OSM, I was wondering about something else I wanted to do for a while: having Journelly’s latitude and longitude fed automatically to OSM in Emacs, so I can view the location on a map.

Journelly captures locations and weather information for each note and stores those under properties, like so:

PROPERTIES:
:LATITUDE: ##.##########
:LONGITUDE: ##.##########
:WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 62.1°F
:WEATHER_CONDITION: Cloudy
:WEATHER_SYMBOL: cloud
:END:

The OSM function that calls for those is osm-goto.

So what we need is a simple function to feed the properties values directly:

(defun jtr-goto-from-properties ()
(interactive)
(let ((lat (org-entry-get (point) "LATITUDE"))
(lon (org-entry-get (point) "LONGITUDE")))
(if (and lat lon)
(osm-goto (string-to-number lat) (string-to-number lon) osm-default-zoom)
(message "No LATITUDE/LONGITUDE properties found on this entry"))))

This is an interactive function that I use when I’m standing on the header in Journelly I want to see on a map. It’s quick and works well. Now I can use my Journelly entries, which are already in org-mode, as a base for a post with a map tile inside Emacs. OSM doesn’t have a native function to export an image, but since I usually want to annotate the image anyway before I make a post out of it, a regular screen-capture app is a good solution, at least for now.

Sun, 24 May 2026 11:09:50 -0400

I wrote about Harper before, but I wanted to expand now that I have it working on Kubuntu with a couple of more options.

Harper is good in two scenarios for me: first, when I want something quick and I don’t feel like starting a browser with Grammarly in it, and second, when I write a personal email and the idea of my words going to some AI grammar bot somewhere makes my skin crawl. Otherwise, for my blog (which is public anyway) and work email (I don’t care about those) Grammarly is definitely better.

The issue with Linux is that the makers of Harper geared it toward macOS (Homebrew) and Arch Linux, among other things. It was made for programmers by programmers, and these guys don’t bother with Ubuntu-like distros. Fair, but up until recently it meant I had to jump through hoops.

The quick and easy route in Ubuntu distros (which is what Kubuntu is) is to use snap. I know, I know. I didn’t want to either, but since the Harper makers don’t bother with flatpak, the other option was to install a Rust environment, which is a big overkill just for an app inside Emacs I use like once a month or so or less. I don’t like snap and I don’t use it, but I made an exception here. (Edit: I actually decided to go ahead with Rust and Cargo, and explained what I did)

Now, that snap “shortcut” is by a guy who works with Ubuntu (I think) and maintains his own package for it, so it’s on the edge channel (not stable) and seems to be a lot behind (version .49 to be exact, and Harper is currently 2.2.1!) so if Harper is your choice of grammar check, and you use it daily, I’d suggest against what I’m doing below. I’d install as needed in that case, Rust and all.

With that disclaimer, let’s move on: sudo snap install harper --edge.

Now in Emacs, in Linux, we want to tell it where harper is:

    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
               (add-to-list 'exec-path "/snap/harper/current/bin"))

When tells it to add the snap path only when running Linux, since I have the same config for both macOS and Linux.

That’s all… After that, I’ve added some of Harper’s flags, or linters. Here’s the whole code as I have it in my emacs org settings:

          (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
            (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                         '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio"))))
    
           (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                      '(:harper-ls (:dialect "American" :linters (:LongSentences :json-false :AvoidCurses :json-false))))
    
    ;; Besides choosing American as the language, I also want to ignore long sentences (the main issue is that it hides other errors nested in those) and I also want harper not to tell me when it thinks something is offensive. The full list of these options is in https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules. It needs to be nested inside the :linters option.
    
           (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
             (add-to-list 'exec-path "/snap/harper/current/bin"))
    
    ;; on a mac, Harper is installed via Homebrew - on Kubuntu, the best option is snap - the harper team does not do a package (flatpak) unfortunately, and I don't want to install Rust just for harper. So.. meh.  I did sudo 'snap install harper --edge' for this.

It's official: I prefer Inkwell over Elfeed

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:17:42 -0400

Last night I realized two things:

I haven’t touched Elfeed in about a month
I’ve been reading and interacting more with people’s posts than ever As I was looking at my Inkwell’s RSS feeds and cleaning up, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it looks:

And, yes, I prefer it over my list of feeds in elfeed, which are stored in an .org file - essentially lines of text with comments and tags.

I’m pretty sure this is the opposite case for most folks who use Emacs. First, Emacs users want to use Emacs more, not less, and second, Inkwell is not available without Micro.blog¹.

But I think this is the point I’m getting at: Inkwell belongs in Micro.blog; actually, it is Micro.blog.

When I started using Micro.blog three years ago, I considered it mostly an alternative to running my own static site with Hugo, between fixing issues with Hugo, my CSS, Netlify and ~~understanding~~ attempting to understand git and Magit. Yes, Micro.blog is an alternative to all of that, but it isn’t just a blogging platform; It’s a definition of a contemporary blogger.

If you look at Micro.blog’s set of tools, you’ll see what I mean: it contains tools to keep track and post about books, movies and TV shows, private (encrypted) notes, photos and self-made video clips², save articles and qoutes from around the internet (pocket style), automatic integration with other social media where possible - all of this around your hosted blog, complete with plugins and a theme (and let’s not forget the AI integration, if you want it and turn it on) you can tweak and take with you - your posts, media, css, everything - wherever you go.

And Inkwell adds an important direction to this mix.

My blogging hour in the morning now continues where I left off the night before, with saved highlights and complete articles from other people I keep track of. The integration between Inkwell and Micro.blog, where my reading turns into writing, still requires some work as the UI and some of the bugs get sorted out, but it’s there. And it’s already better and more intuitive for me than Elfeed, which takes place in its own isolated space.

Elfeed is very good at what it does (and hopefully, what it will keep on doing, with its creator leaving Emacs), and it has been good to me. It still is. But Inkwell, Micro.blog, and my recent adventures with finding out more bloggers and learning more about the Indieweb feel like an evolution. It’s the next step of whatever I’m doing here.

Footnotes

¹: I recall Manton borrowed the idea from a different RSS reader, but I can’t find the reference right now

²: Finding an alternative to YouTube these days is not easy, and if you’re not trying to “build a brand” and repeat the chant of “click and subscribe,” the only semi-reliable alternative that comes to mind is PeerTube and (maybe Dailymotion?) - but Manton found a way that seem sustainable, at least for now.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:22:10 -0400

Yesterday morning, I imported an old-blog post of mine, which discusses org-id and UUIDs in org-mode. It’s a bit of a deep dive into how org-mode works. I find that I don’t do those as much anymore - probably because I mostly use Emacs “as is” with a few packages I use day to day, and my workflow has been pretty much the same (capture templates not included) for the last two years or so.

Display images with Org-attach and org-insert-link quickly and effectively

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:43:25 -0400

Suppose you have an org-mode file and want an image to appear in the buffer. The way to do that is to insert a link to the file, for example:

[[home/username/downloads/image.png]].

Then, you toggle inline images with C-c C-x C-v, and the image should display inside the org-mode buffer, provided the path in the link is correct. If you do this often in your notes as I do, you might as well just turn it on for the entire file with #+STARTUP: inlineimages at the top of your org file, with the rest of the options you have there; this way, images will always display when you load the file. This is all nice and good, and most of us org-mode users probably know that.

A common use case for a full workflow like this is attaching images to your org file. You have a file in your Downloads folder, as shown in the example above, and you want to keep the image with your org file where it belongs, rather than in Downloads, where it will be lost among other files sooner or later.

For this, as most of us know, we have org-attach (C-c C-a by default). This starts a wonderful organizational process for our files:

It creates a data folder (by default) inside the folder the org-file is in if it’s not there
It then gives the header (even if you don’t have one) a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) and creates two more directories, one inside the other:
1. The parent directory consists of the first part of the UUID
2. The child directory consists of the rest of the UUID
Lastly, the file itself will be copied into the child directory above.

For example:

./data/acde070d/8c4c-4f0d-9d8a-162843c10333/someimage.png

If you’re not used to how org-attach works, it might take some time getting used to, but it’s worth it. Images (or any file, as we will deal with soon) are kept next to the files they are associated with. Of course, org-attach is customizable, and you can change those folders and UUIDs to make them less cryptic.

For example, my init includes this:

    (setq org-id-method 'ts)
    (setq org-attach-id-to-path-function-list 
      '(org-attach-id-ts-folder-format
        org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format))

This tells org-mode to change the UUID to IOS date stamp format, so the folders under the data folder are dates, and tells org-mode to use that system (~~I wrote about this in length in my old blog; it is yet another post I need to bring over here~~ it’s here now.).

In my case, this creates a file reference system by date: inside the data folder, each month of the year has a folder; inside those, a folder for the day and time (down to fractions of seconds) of the attachment. The beauty of org-attach is that you’re not meant to deal with the files directly. You summon the org-attach dispatcher and tell it to go to the relevant folder (C-c C-a to bring it up, then f as the option to go to that directory).

org-attach and displaying images inline are known to many org-mode users, but here comes the part I never realized:

org-attach stores the link to the file you just attached inside a variable called org-stored-link, along with other links you might have grabbed, like URLs from the web (take a look with C-h v org-stored-links). And, even better, these links are added to your org-insert-link, ready to go when you insert a link to your file with C-c C-l.

So when you have an image ready to attach to an org file, say in your Downloads folder, you could first attach it with org-attach, and then you can call it back quickly with C-c C-l. The trick is, since this is an image link (and not just any file), is not to give it a description. By default, org-mode will suggest you describe the link as the file you attached, but inline images do not work like that, and with a description, the image will just display as a file name. In other words:

A link to an image you want to display in the org buffer should look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/someimage.jpg]]

But any other file would look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/somefile.jpg][description]]

By deleting the suggestion, you are effectively creating the first case, the one that is meant to display images. This is explained nicely here.

There’s more to it. As it turns out, the variable org-attach-store-link-p is responsible for the links to these files to automatically be stored in org-insert-link (you can toggle it to change this option). This is why, when you use it, your files or images will show as [[attachment:description]], without the need for the path as specified above.

I have years of muscle memory to undo, as I’m used to manually inserting the links with the full path for my images. I did not realize the links to the images I’ve attached are right there, ready for me to place into the buffer if I only delete the description.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:36:36 -0400

So emacs plus (through homebrew on macOS) keeps giving me this error: Invalid function: org-element-with-disabled-cache.

Does anyone know what this is about, and why it’s happening? No issue with Emacs on Linux (same config) or when I had emacsformacos (same config)

I believe I fixed it this morning (3/11) by removing Emacs-plus completely and reinstalling.

brew uninstall emacs-plus@30
brew cleanup (this removes dependencies, where I think the issue was)
Delete emacs.app and emacs-client.app from /Applications (I keep forgetting to do this)
brew install emacs-app (which is now emacs plus, from what I got through Homebrew)

I also ran Brew Doctor between steps 2 and 3 and found a couple of issues I resolved, which shouldn’t be related, but you never know.

What started this whole thing, I think, was that I wanted to try the new org-mode on top of the old org-mode. I am not too sure, but it seems like that was the problem.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:20 -0400

A new Emacs annoyance: org-capture: Capture abort: Invalid function: org-element-with-disabled-cache when I try to use org-capture. Fails the first time, works the second. Where did it come from and how do I get rid of it…?

Harp is org-mode medical app for Android

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:02:26 -0400

There’s the app for health-related records Irreal mentioned the other day, Harp. It’s an org-mode-centered app for Android (soon to be iOS though), which looks pretty basic at this point. You can create several profiles (for different people), and each one has a medical journal and documentation attached, along with some graphs as you accumulate data.

It’s a good idea to have an org-mode-based health app, with all the information you need available to you quickly, protected behind encryption. The issue specific to me is that even though I have a personal Android phone, it’s my iPhone that has my medical apps (part of the Epic suite), as this is the phone I usually carry around with me. These apps already have all my health records, doctors, appointment etc.

I’ve been playing with it a bit, and I think it’s mostly the idea of having my health records saved in org mode that makes sense, especially with the denote file convention system. My Android is also where I have signal, which I can use to share medical records with people close to me, so there’s that. It’s not ideal to carry around two phones, but I think I want to experiment for a bit.

I think I found what crashed my Emacs on macOS

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:46:04 -0400

For those of you following along, Emacs has been crashing on my Mac (but not on my Linux desktop) for a while, but it seemed too random to pinpoint. This led me into looking for the Darwin version in the Emacs build in Emacs for Mac OS (which was what I was using on my Mac), which was a couple of versions behind that of macOS itself.

I went ahead and attempted to use Emacs Plus from Homebrew, as most people commented. I haven’t noticed much of a difference, though personally I do prefer to use Emacs from Homebrew as I do with my other packages, so I stuck with it a bit longer.

Yesterday I encountered a stubborn crash in my journelly.org file. Journelly, which is basically a large org-file with pictures displayed in-line under some headers (you can get an idea of what Journelly is and how I use it here).

I took a picture of the snow outside with my iPhone using Journelly, which saved it to journelly.org with the image attached. On the Mac, every time I went to open the header, Emacs crashed, time after time. I just couldn’t edit that image. In a collapsed state for the header, where the image didn’t show, it was fine. On Linux, when I tried - fine. Oh, and before you ask - I tried this with emacs -Q, and yes, it crashed every single time as well.

The JPG image on my iPhone was a 7MB file with dimensions of 4284 x 5712. I knew from past experience that such large images slow down Emacs (on Linux too), so I shrunk it down to a 700kb file with dimensions of 604 x 640, and launched Emacs again. No problem. Everything was stable. I tried to load Emacs a few more times and it worked each time.

This was my hunch from the beginning - that something is up with images at least on the Mac, and this is proof enough for me. I don’t know exactly at what point Emacs crashes: is it a matter of how many images the org file has? How big are they? A combination of both? But I can tell you it seems to be more about the dimensions of the image in pixels than the file size. This is fine for me, for my journal, I don’t need large high-resolution images anyway; those are uploaded and displayed on my blog and elsewhere. It seems that some folks have encountered similar issues as well, from Reddit and elsewhere.

If you have similar issues and you’re fine with scaling down your images, a good solution is dwim-shell-commands-resize-image-in-pixels, part of the excellent dwim-shell-command package, which can quickly shrink down a large number of images from inside Emacs. I’m using it constantly.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:23:07 -0400

Switched to emacs-plus to try it again for a few days. Darwin version is now up to date. Let’s see what the differences are, if there are indeed any - and of course, if things keep crashing.

Emacs for macOS and Darwin versions

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:59:07 -0400

Regarding to Emacs crashing: AI found that my Drawin version of Emacs might be the cause. I’ve been using Emacs for Mac OS which ran darwin21.6.0 - old… (current version on macOS is 25.3.0)

The question is, is this really the problem, or more like the AI making stuff up? It makes sense to me that an Emacs build is based on a slightly older Darwin version, though I’m not an expert. Another reason for this suspicion is that the AI assistant recommended emacs-plus without considering emacs for macOS. I know both are solid based on my own research, and I used Emacs-plus (available with Homebrew) for a while. I’ve been using Emacs for macOS for about a year, and it’s been fine until I believe I updated to the latest macOS, which everyone seems to hate, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with macOS 26 more than anything else.

For now, I installed the latest version of Emacs for macOS, which was built on darwin23.2 - still behind, but not as bad. If this is what’s running Emacs 30.2 for so many Mac users, it further confirms my suspicion that the Darwin version is not really the issue. But maybe I’m wrong.

I posted my question on Reddit to get some feedback, and out of curiosity, see what the Darwin version is for Emacs-plus (don’t want to install it right now). Guess we’ll see.

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:53:42 -0400

Lately, Emacs on my Mac has been crashing more frequently. I don’t know for sure what it is, and I can’t get much from the logs, but it seems to be somewhat related to images. Perhaps some memory issue.

My research has led me to suspect that perhaps emacs-plus from Homebrew would be better (I’ve been using Emacs for macOS), but I’m not quite sure yet.

Right now I’m too tired to tackle it, so I’m going to crawl to bed. I’ve been too tired and too busy in the evenings to do much of my personal projects, which sucks. Hope to get some stuff done this weekend, but it’s going to be a busy one.

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:06:20 -0400

Denote includes the option of adding different directories, so this now makes sense:

(setq denote-directory
      (if (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)          ; If I'm using Linux, include the private folder.
          (list (expand-file-name "~/Sync/Notes")
                (expand-file-name "~/Documents/private"))
        (list (expand-file-name "~/Sync/Notes")))) ; If I'm using anything else (macOS) just Notes.

(setq denote-excluded-directories-regexp "data") ; the data folder (with attachments) is excluded.

I have a private folder for Denote notes on Linux only. I used to only sync my Sync/Notes folder, which includes my informational notes and blog posts, but that means I’m missing out on Denote’s abilities in my private folder, which is slowly increasing in size. This solves this problem.

There’s no need to list the data folder (which includes my attachments, mostly in file formats that are not Denote’s format), so that’s why the exclusion is there.

Org files to beatiful docx files with Pandoc

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:55:30 -0400

When it comes to sharing written documents with my co-workers, I usually need to use Word or PDFs. Org-mode includes an export option to odt files, which does the job in a pinch, but it’s a bit harder to customize, especially if I want to preserve certain formatting elements. In the past, I used to create ODT files, import them into Word, make whatever changes I needed, and save them in a docx file. The problem there, besides the manual work, is consistency. If I want to make sure I use the same style for fonts, header sizes, and table formats, things get annoying fast.

About a year ago, I discovered that Pandoc can use an external Word document (docx) as a style template. As long as I have this file accessible, every org file I convert to docx will automatically (and beautifully, I may add) retain the exact style changes I need. This, of course, can be automated later inside Emacs, so the export process is basically seamless.

The problem lies in the fact that you need to work with Word and understand how its styles. Readers of this blog know I love to complain about Microsoft’s UI and its lack of consistency, and the instructions here are one fine example in my opinion. Be it as it may, I will try to keep the snarky comments in check.

Creating the default style sheet

The first thing to do is get Pandoc to create its default style reference document as a .docx. This can be done with pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx.

What you’re telling Pandoc here is to output (-o) a file named custom-reference.docx (you can call it whatever you’d like, as long as it’s a docx, since you want to work with Word). What to output goes into this file? The default reference document.

Once you do that, you will have a custom-reference.docx in the folder you ran the command from.

Now it’s time to work inside Word.

Modifying the styles

What you will see is a rather plain file listing a bunch of styles and their name. First, you will see “Title,” and it will be nice and big because it’s using the Title style in Word. Heading 1 will use the Heading 1 style, Body Text (further down) will use the Body Text style, and so on.

What you want to do is to access these styles in Word. You will be modifying them to fit to your liking.

To do that, search for the Styles Pane. In my case, Office 365 for macOS, I can find it in the ribbon under Home, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a little different if you’re using Windows, or a different version of Word.

With the Style Pane open, you will see a long list of the available styles. You can navigate this way, but I find it’s easier to just look for them in the document to the left and select them; it will then show under Current style: to the right.

Now that you have a style selected, select the name of that style from the Style Pane and choose Modify Style…¹. You will see the options available to you, such as the font name, text color, alignment, etc.

Make sure that you do not change the Name: of the style! You’re modifying existing default styles that Pandoc recognizes; if you create a new one (by giving it a new name), Pandoc will not know what to do with it and will ignore it. Remember, you are modifying a reference sheet of existing styles, not creating new styles. Likewise, this means that you have no reason to change anything in the document itself (the content) - Pandoc doesn’t care about that and will ignore it. You’re only touching the options in the Modify Style… window.

That’s basically all there is to it. As you will see soon, some items can get a bit more complicated as they are not available in the same way. Save the files when you’re done modifying the styles. You will probably keep going back to this document as you export docx files, tweaking things until you like them.

Using Pandoc to export from org-mode to a docx file

The next step is to tell Pandoc to convert an existing org file to a docx file using the reference sheet we just worked on. To do that, use the following command:

pandoc -s <input_file.org> -o <output_file.docx> --reference-doc custom-reference.docx.

The idea is the same as before, but we use a stationary option, -s (the reason for that is that we’re telling Pandoc to use a “full” version of a document, needed with the reference doc option, otherwise it can’t use our reference document).

Then, we’re pointing Pandoc to our org file and using the output, -o, as the doc file we want, then finally using the reference-doc option by utilizing our reference file, custom-reference.docx (unless you change the name to something else). That’s it, Pandoc will create the file in the folder you are in.

Images and Tables

For me, things get a bit more complicated. My technical documents often include screenshots, and I need those embedded in the resulting Word docx file.

The above command will embed images in the Word document, as long as org-mode can find and display your images (using the inlineimages option in org-mode). My org-mode technical notes are all written with Denote these days, which keeps everything organized, including the images, which are inside the default data subfolder. If your workflow is different, be mindful of your path to the images; you’d probably want to use an absolute path in org-mode (use C-u C-u C-c C-l when linking an image instead of the usual C-u C-c C-l for this). There’s also the option to extract media in Pandoc (see the –extract-media option). In my opinion, it’s simpler and cleaner to dedicate a folder for your org documents, completed with a subfolder for attachments.

Another issue that stumbled me was the tables.

Pandoc’s default style for tables is minimal - without borders. This might look nice if you want to hide your tables, but if you need a table with borders and perhaps some shading, you’ll run into issues.

The problem is with Word. The style for the table is not included in the Style Pane. In order to change the style for your table in the reference doc, you need to locate Table Design in your ribbon. Notice that if you work on a small screen (like in my recording), you might have to expand your options to find it. Then, you will have to extend the pane further and locate the Modify Table Style below. Once again, this is true for my case, Office 365 on macOS. If you’re using a different Office version or on Windows, this menu might be located elsewhere.

Once you have Modify Table Style open, you can change the borders and shading to your heart’s content, but as before, make sure the style name remains Table. If you create a new style, Pandoc will ignore it.

A few tricks I picked up

Under the name of the style, in the Modify Style or Modify Table Style window, you will see the Style based on option. You can change this option and browse through different colors and fonts to find something you like, and then customize further instead of starting from scratch. As long as you don’t change the name of the style, you’re OK. I found this useful when working with tables, as I was looking for a table with shading on every other row.

Speaking of tables, the border button is the little square icon in the middle. I spent a few moments trying to find it.

Bonus: use dwim-shell-command for quick export

If you’re an Emacs user, you like shortcuts, and you like to use shell commands from within Emacs. If you haven’t yet, check out dwim-shell-command.

Here’s how I have it set up. All I have to do is mark the org file(s) I want to convert to a docx, and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if I want to export only one file or fifty; it’s the same ease of use.

(defun jtr/dwim-shell-command-pandoc-org-to-docx ()
  "uses pandoc to convert an org file to docx using a template docx file. The docx template file is stored in my Notes sync folder"
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "converting from org to docx"
   "pandoc -s '<<f>>' -o '<<fne>>.docx' --reference-doc ~/Sync/Notes/Info/custom-reference.docx"
   :utils "pandoc"))

Footnotes

¹ : Or, another way to work is to use to select the text you want to modify, then go to Format and select Style from there; you will need to then choose Modify in the window that shows.

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:35:29 -0400

A bit of a teaser:

This bit of dwim-shell-command magic works nicely:

  (defun jtr/dwim-shell-command-pandoc-org-to-docx ()
    "uses pandoc to convert an org file to docx using a template docx file. The docx template file is stored in my synced notes folder"
    (interactive)
    (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
     "converting from org to docx"
     "pandoc -s '<<f>>' -o '<<fne>>.docx' --reference-doc ~/Sync/Notes/custom-reference.docx"
     :utils "pandoc"))

Why I use Denote?

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:12:09 -0400

When I mentioned Denote again a couple of days ago, Omar commented that whenever someone mentions using Denote or org-roam, he’s curious to know if that person tried vanilla org-mode first, without additional packages.

I get it. After all, I’ve been resisting the whole Zettelkasten bandwagon and org-roam with it for a while, keeping the same opinion about org-roam Omar seems to have about Denote (I’m speculating here, of course). In general, I don’t like the idea of Doom Emacs or Spacemacs for the same reasons. Denote, for some reason, never registered this way. I liked it from day one.

As I was answering his question and he asked for more details, I thought it might make a good post. So here we are.

Not a whole lot changed for me since I first looked into Denote. I still mostly use it for my blog posts (like the one you’re reading right now) and my info notes, which mostly contain technical how-tos to myself and to a lesser degree, some records and memos, like a list of equipment in my home or who’s who at work. At this point, I also have a third, personal folder with notes only on my Linux computer as well, which mostly contain “supplemental” notes as I call them to journal entries I want to expand on in private (I use my work iPhone with Journelly, which does a fantastic job, but I don’t trust Apple or any cloud service for that matter with my private stuff).

It has been slow progress, but I’ve improved my usability with Denote, which I recently enhanced further after having the pleasure of talking to Prot 1:1 in one of his online tutoring sessions (always a pleasure, and highly recommended if you ask me).

The main philosophy behind Denote is something I’ve been in agreement with for a long time, before I started using it, or Emacs, or even got familiar with Linux: the idea of how to date and rename files. I’ve never agreed with the American way of writing dates, and I always prefer the ISO format: yyyymmdd followed by hhmm. To me, this is how things should be organized. So when Denote came around with Prot explaining that this is how he sees files should be organized - date, followed by keywords, and then a title - it just clicked.

You can extend this file-naming scheme to all your personal files if you’d like (at least all the files you visit with Dired), and I’m in the process of doing exactly that. Because the renaming function is built into Denote, it’s easy to stay concise and avoid mistakes (for example, renaming one file 20260124 something, and then another 2026124, emitting the 0 for January). While it’s true you could easily do that without Denote, to me, this core piece was like a sign that said, “Hey, look at this, this guy is building a package that is based on something that makes sense, check it out.”

Tags are another important part of Denote. Org-mode has tags built into headers, which works, but the headers, to me, are a bit too specific to need them. For the most part, I can get the level of information I need through the header itself, and I use tags to associate a certain header with a person - but even that is not useful, as I often work with too many people for the tags to really mean anything. Meanwhile, it’s the files themselves that need tags: certain workflows are similar, but are tagged to work for different operating systems (say, how to set my work VPN on Linux vs on my Mac), or maybe I have a naming convention for different departments at work, and I want to tag the relevant departments.

I didn’t always break my different workflows and notes into files. In the past, I had one org file as a wiki: a single file with many headers explaining workflows and procedures. I often had errors there. It was one big file that I often opened and edited, so I had syncing issues, headers that got mixed up, etc. The other problem I had with the wiki was logical: at times, a certain subheader would fit under two different headers, and I would have a hard time deciding where to place something. Headers work as categories, while tags work as ,well, tags. If we take the VPN example from before, I could put my VPN instructions under “networking,” “security,” or “remote work,” but not all. I don’t have this problem with Denote.

Another, more recent skill I started using with Denote is its metadata and search features. Meta notes work as an index of other files, where I can have one file with a dynamic list (updated whenever the file is loaded) of live links to other files with the same tag or other regex I use. Meanwhile, searching with Denote using denote-grep (something I learned recently) shows a list of all the files matching my search in collapsible form, making it easy to find what I need. I can use one of many denote-query forms to filter those results even further, and of course, there’s denote-consult, which, well, if you know consult, you know what it does, and it’s excellent.

Finding stuff is a central issue for anyone keeping notes, no matter what system they use. Denote supplies me with the best tools I’ve seen for this job. It’s true that many of these tools are already available in Emacs and in org-mode. Denote doesn’t alter these existing options; rather, it builds on them. In fact, that’s a big part of Denote: the way its commands are constructed borrows from what Emacs already does, so if you’re familiar with one, you intuitively know what the same thing would do inside Denote.

Another example of the above is the org files you create with Denote. You can use Denote directly with a capture template, and each file is created with file tags that make sense if you use org-mode: #-title, #+date and #+filetags, which denote changes automatically as you rename files with it. These work together with additional options I include in my notes, such as #+STARTUP: inlineimages. In a Markdown export, such as this very post you’re reading now, Emacs knows to ignore these org-mode only options, so I don’t need to clean them out when I’m ready to post. It’s a nice touch that already exists in vanilla org-mode, but with the added benefits of Denote, like having my post tagged, dated, and easily found in a search alongside the rest of my Denote files in the future.

There are definitely more features of Denote I don’t use, or use enough (blacklinks, which I believe are more of a recent introduction, is one of them), but as I stated above, this is a process. I learn more every week, and as my notes collection increases, so does my understanding of how to use Denote in a way that works for me.

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 10:48:50 -0400

Spent the last day and a half on and off figuring out how to use pandoc to make my org-mode files in pretty, readable docx files, including tables. It was a challenge, but it’s worth it. The key is to use a reference doc and to know how to use it. Need to expend on that.

Reflection on my Emacs experience

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:56:08 -0400

A couple of days ago I found out org-mode capture sun menus can handle additional nested menus. To recap quickly here (see more details in the link), this means that you’d have the main menu for capture templates, which will lead to additional templates menus, and that menu can keep leading to more and more menus. I am not sure how many levels of these templates we can have, but “more than enough” is a good enough answer for me.

As I was writing the post above, I went back to my old blog and reviewed two of my older, Emacs-usage-defining posts, and added them to this blog: Org-mode in files and Submenus in org-mode capture.

Those of you who enjoy reading about the Emacs experience from a user perspective (especially someone who started out without a programming background) might want to give those a read, in the order mentioned above. Beyond explaining these crucial org-mode methods (and in my opinion, crucial to use Emacs in general), these describe the struggle and the learning process of, well, how to Emacs correctly: from realizing an option exists (of course it exists, it’s Emacs), through asking the right questions, to finding the information and implementing the solution.

I’ve spent a couple of hours re-reading and revising these posts, and reached a conclusion that many of you who are reading this over their RSS feed in Emacs would probably agree with. We, Emacs users who blog, have a critical role in the Emacs ecosystem: we provide others with ideas and questions to ask, which can later be directed to official channels, the manual, and brainstorming answers.

As I mentioned a couple of times throughout the lifetime of my blog (this one and the old one): Emacs is not just a program, it’s a lifestyle.

org-mode capture: menu inside a menu

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:49:04 -0400

Over the weekend, I modified my org-capture templates again. I was curious to see if I could create a second-level menu in org-mode capture under my already existing menu items - and as it turns out, it’s possible, and also pretty straightforward. Here’s the start of the setting (keep in mind it’s not complete, don’t just copy-paste this):

    (setq org-capture-templates
          (quote (
                  ("w" "work") 
                  ("wt" "work-ticket") 
                  ("wta" "work-ticket department A" entry
                   (file "~/Sync/Work/department A.org") (file "~/Sync/Templates/temp-ticket.org"):prepend t)

This will result in the following:

    Select a capture template
    ===========================
    
    [w]... work...

then:

    Select a capture template
    ===========================
    
    [wt]... work ticket...

then:

    Select a capture template
    ===========================
    
    [wta] work-ticket department A

I should explain this further, probably first explaining why I need such a complicated system of menus within menus, but every time I sit down to explain I run out of time. I wanted to put it out there first, and I’ll come around to explain it soon, hopefully.

I like the DU command in Dired

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:46:01 -0400

I had fun using the du command in Emacs this morning (that’s what I do when I don’t sleep well; judge away).

In Linux (and macOS), the DU command (I believe it stands for Disk Usage) is usually used to figure out what folders take up space on your hard drive.

While different GUI tools exist, they are not useful on encrypted drives on Linux, as they show the encrypted blocks instead of the directories, which don’t really tell you much (you could probably run those with escalated permissions, but I didn’t try).

For a gamer like me, it’s useful to see which games take up the most space. Here’s an example with a few useful flags, in the command line:

du -hs ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/* | sort -h

Shows me the following:

    4.0K    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Steam.dll
    76K     /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Steam Controller Configs
    100K    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime
    248M    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Steamworks Shared
    657M    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_soldier
    776M    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper
    1.4G    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental
    3.4G    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Deep Rock Survivor
    3.5G    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Deep Rock Galactic
    11G     /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Hades II
    21G     /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Yakuza Kiwami
    82G     /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Space Marine 2
    132G    /home/jtr/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Helldivers 2

Some of the Steam-related components are not games, but… Helldivers 2 takes how much space?? Anyway.

A quick review of the options I used:

-hs for human readable (shows space in G for gigabyte and M for megabyte instead of writing in kilobytes) and summary (shows the top directory only)

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/* for the target path (this is where Steam stores the games in Linux, at least in Debian distros)

| to pipe the du command it into another command to read it better, in this case:

sort -h the sort command, which will sort it nicely again by order in human format. We need this last part if we want to see the directory in order, with the biggest one at the bottom.

Some places recommend using sort -hr, the additional r for reverse, which means in this case we will see the biggest directory at the top of the list. I don’t need it, because I want to see the biggest folder at the bottom, near the command line, which is where I’m going to focus next.

In Emacs, this command is easier use and works better thanks to Dired. Find a folder, mark it (m) in dired, and run dired-do-shell-command (!) and follow up with du -hs.

But since we’re in Emacs, and we might want to work with the results as text, we could use dired-do-async-shell-command (&). This will place the output in a temporary buffer we can work with (so we can save it to a text file, for example, with C-x C-w).

And here’s another thing I didn’t know: you can run these commands in Dired on multiple directories. Just mark several directories in Dired, and the resulting buffer will give you a list of all the directories you’ve marked. If you have this saved as a text buffer, it’s pretty easy to work withthe results (for example, save it as an org file and add headers telling you what you want to do with each directory).

By the way, even though it’s somewhat redundant with Dired’s default listing of files, you can also add the a option for du in this case ( for all) to display the files in the directories you’re viewing. This is useful in cases like the above, where you’re already working with the du command in Emacs and interested in looking at individual files as well, not just directories. Of course, you can just go in and list the files in Dired and open another Dired buffer with another directory listing files by size… this is Emacs, you have many ways to do whatever you want.

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:31:07 -0400

I think I’m going back to clocking in and out of sub-tasks, even though I said I wouldn’t. It’s easier not to, but the end result, I think, is messier, and I can’t get the clock reports right… on the other hand, it’s kind of an overkill. 🤔

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:43:34 -0400

Rediscovering org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift: if you have regular meetings, this is the function for you.

Create a Meeting event with everything you need (Zoom links, place for notes, tags, etc) and clone it X number of times. Emacs will ask you for the frequency. You now have X meetings ready.

Handling project in Emacs - the 2025 version

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 23:10:11 -0400

Ever since I’ve decided to move away from iCloud¹, I’ve had a hard time syncing my org files with Beorg, which is how I worked with org-mode tasks on my iPhone. Frustrated, I looked into a solution that I should have revisited long ago: Plain Org.

I got Plain Org before I heard of Journelly, so it’s not just because I’m a fan of Álvaro’s work. At the time, I was just looking for an app that could read org files and lay out my projects in a nice, clear way. As it turns out, Plain Org does more than that - by doing less.

Compared to Beorg, Plain Org is very minimal. But it works with Synctrain (Syncthing for iOS), it accesses my org files on my iPhone quickly and easily, and it lets me make quick modifications when needed. For everything else, there’s Emacs. And that’s what I seem to have forgotten.

It took me a while to reconnect with the understanding that my iPhone is not the place to manage tasks and projects, despite what everyone around me seems to think, whether it’s my workplace with its Microsoft Office suite or Apple with its ever-improving Notes and Reminders. As I mentioned earlier, other apps look and work great, as long as you play by their rules. As soon as you need something customized for your needs, you’re out of luck. I can play by the rules to an extent, but not when it comes to how I think and work. I guess I had to write it out here to arrive at that conclusion again, and surprise surprise, things are working out again.

What followed was reorganizing all my org files. A deep system cleaning that was much overdue. First, I archived many of them in my archive folder. Next, I went into my projects org file itself and archived a big chunk of projects that should have been completed and/or put away a long time ago. The trick was to remind myself that archiving is not the same as throwing away something: it’s simply putting it out of sight. It’s a simple rule: if it just sits there staring me in the face for more than a week, it needs to be archived. If I need to work on it again, I can put it back: org-refile is a powerful tool. I can always go into my archive folder, which is not a part of my agenda on purpose, and search through it with occur or consult-grep.

Speaking of my org-agenda: I got rid of scheduled TODO tasks, and I’m trying to keep it this way.

The kind of work I do today is 100% projects. There’s no such thing as a simple task; if it’s simple, it gets delegated. This means each project header, which is signified by the keyword ACTIVE, has somewhere between 5 to 20 subheaders: meetings, additional tickets, purchases, notes, emails, documents attached with org-attach, you name it.

Making these subheaders into scheduled TODO items quickly overwhelms my agenda and hurts motivation. Besides, I was stuck in the habit of always having a next-action item for every single thing, so many of those TODOs just ended up being something like “Follow Up” or “Reminder.” That’s a waste. A project is already marked with “ACTIVE” for a reason, after all. I know I need to follow up on something, that’s the entire point. The other thing is that the project header (the parent header) should be the header I work with. It’s where I keep my logbook notes (C-c C-z), and where I clock in and out. I used to do this for each subtask, but then I had to think about which notes go under which task, and it made it harder to follow up later, as I had to search across different tasks containing different fragments of notes. It’s too much running in circles. Now I just look at my list of projects, pick one to work on, and start a clock (C-c C-x C-i). When I’m done, I clock out (C-c C-x C-i) and write a few notes about what I did.

I still use subheaders when I need to save something (like an email, a ticket, or meeting notes), or when I work on something that takes more than half an hour on its own.

My work environment is a hectic mess these days, and Emacs is the only thing that is flexible enough (as always) to deal with… everything. The amount of productivity and communication apps people at work around me use is staggering, but they all work in the browser, need to be online, and don’t allow to customize things.

I need to be able to organize my head in Emacs. This is so important that I’m considering enforcing a small unofficial “break” during the day when I just sit down and clean up my projects and actually do some stuff. Otherwise I’ll be stuck all day just running after emails.

Footnotes

¹ Many folks use iCloud and are happy with it, so why do I make my life difficult? The two technical reasons are my Linux desktop, which I use to access some of my org files, and my Android, which is more like a backup device to capture some notes. Another reason is the lack of control of iCloud: it works most of the time, but when it doesn’t, it really messed me up. It just stays stuck and doesn’t sync for whatever reason, and in case of a conflict, iCloud “decides” which file is the right one and overwrites whatever was there before. When I lost some work because of this recently, it was the last straw. Syncthing would always create a conflict file, where I can run Diff in emacs and quickly decide what I want to keep. It also has a built-in file versioning in its folders, which has saved me a couple of times in the past.

There’s also the tinfoil hat: I’m grumpy guy who yells at clouds. To put simply, I don’t trust Apple to store my personal and private files. After viewing their transperency report I was surprised to find out they share data with law enforcement 70-80 percent of the time. I just don’t like the “think of the kids” PG approach.

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:09:52 -0400

If you’ve been using Emacs on macOS and iOS for a while, you probably know Álvaro Ramírez, the maker of Journelly and dwim-shell-command. I’m a fan of both.

Turns out Álvaro has a sponsorship page on GitHub. If you benefit from his work and look for a way to help out, this is it!

Emacs and mental challanges

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:32:52 -0400

As part of a trip to see her friend, my mom went to a show of Porsche cars last week. This is a group of enthusiastic Porsche owners from different years. One of the stories she shared was about a proud Porsche owner who drives in countries that require the driver’s seat on the right (I’m assuming the UK or Ireland?) The driver, instead of abandoning his Porsche, had his beloved car set up with an adjustable steering wheel that can shift to the right or left side of the driver’s seat.

Emacers already know where this is going. We are all, in our own way, drivers just like this guy. The difference, of course, is that we drive Emacs, not a Porsche (though I’m sure there are a few of you out there who drive both!). I find this story inspiring because the laws that dictate where the driver should sit in the car are imposed. There’s nothing the driver could do about the law itself, so they came up with their own solution to work with the law in a clever way. Again… Emacs.

Emacs is not easy to drive in 2025. It has a steep learning curve, especially if you don’t have a good computer background. The other big problem is the outside restrictions. This blog is riddled with challenges I have with Emacs and different workarounds I came up with. I think this post I wrote earlier this year summarizes it well. To recap quickly: my work environment forces me to use applications that don’t play nice with Emacs. The biggest issue I have is with emails (only Outlook is allowed), but other cloud-based software is also problematic, usually because the only interaction with it is through the browser.

There are several community solutions for these issues. One of those is Emacs Everywhere, which I need to try to play with again (the issue I have there is creating a keyboard shortcut invoking a terminal command in macOS, which proved more challenging than I thought it would be), and there are more. But there’s also a bigger issue: there are plenty of new shiny apps out there, and next to Emacs, integration is always easier and nicer. Some of those, if I go deep into the rabbit hole, survive a day or two, even a weekend - but usually I go back to Emacs gasping for air. The overall issue with other apps is that they work nice, as long as you play by their rules and restrictions. As soon as you need to customize something, you’re out of luck. They are usually also all cloud-based, which is something else I don’t like. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I like that the cloud is there as a secondary place when I need it, not forced on me to use.

Some notable examples I visited again recently are both Apple tools: Notes and Journal. Notes got a few more tweaks, making it a useful as a personal database. I love how you can scan documents directly into the App, which works seemingly with the iPhone, and I love how I can now use it on my Apple Watch to check off items when I go grocery shopping. But I would never trust Apple to store my private notes on their servers. Journal has the same issue. The app itself matured nicely, with the addition of a macOS app. It comes with useful reminders, a map to see where entries were entered, a timeline, and a surprisingly good export option to HTML, including all the entries. But it’s also a good reminder of my point above: the date format.

I don’t like the US date format, especially in my personal notes. Org-mode automatically writes dates in a yyyy-mm-dd format, which has always made more sense to me (by the way, if you know a good app that can do that for the top menu in macOS, let me know. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t include that option natively. I’ve tried to change the region and play with the clock options in the past.)

The mindset that long-time Emacs users share with the Prosche driver is what got us into Emacs in the first place. We need things working out our way. In my case, I always liked checklists and bullet points, and I used several tools to help me organize things until I discovered Orgzly, and from there, org-mode and Emacs. I mentioned several times before that I owe my current professional successes (which include promotions at work, beyond just staying sane in a pretty chaotic environment) to org-mode, but that’s not exactly true. It’s the other way around: Emacs org-mode is a tool that enables me to use my mind the way I need to use it to work out information. I believe that if there were other tools that allowed me to change things as much as I can in Emacs, I would work with those too. But, in the age of the cloud, the opposite is true. Workflows are imposed, and customization to fit personal needs usually ends up being limited to dark and light themes.

Emacs is a rare tool that allows you to do whatever you want if you just look under the hood and tweak it to your needs. There aren’t many other programs like it, and I suspect that for most people, they are not needed. But for someone like me, adjusting to other tools doesn’t work well. And it’s not a good thing. I tried to force it a couple of times; believe me, if I were happy with Outlook, OneNote, and SharePoint, my work life would be much simpler. But I get disorganized, and I can’t work without my tools. If I like tinkering with something like Emacs, it’s not just for fun: if I don’t, I’m going to “glitch” until I fix it. It’s a battle uphill, a challenge—always was, and always will be. The benefit, however, is that it keeps me on my feet, and when I get something that works for me, it really works. Better than any other easy solution offered.

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:57:33 -0400

I found a potentially useful package that creates a visual calendar inside Emacs. It seems to be mostly abandoned, at least in its current form. It now requires ugly workarounds in order to work.

Does anyone know something like it that works currently?

Update: From the comments, I’m learning that taking the requirements for compat seems to be the official fix. This is a pretty nice package. I’m exploring it more in depth, and I might change some workflows I have accordingly. I find it amusing that I stumbled into it by chance, as I was writing my other post.

HTML export to work with TiddlyWiki

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:25:47 -0400

Two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the challenges I have when working with TiddlyWiki. In a nutshell, TiddlyWiki is better when you want other people to read technical documentation you otherwise much more comfortable writing inside Emacs org-mode.

My problem is that converting org-mode to WikiText (the way TiddlyWiki works) is a friction point, and I am not willing to leave the comforts of org-mode in favor of TiddlyWiki’s UI and hotkeys. They are OK, but they do not compare to Emacs and good muscle memory.

The solution (or rather, a workaround) that I found is to export my org-mode buffer to HTML with org-mode, and then let TiddlyWiki handle the rest. I documented this process in my wiki as part of recording the workflow.

There are still a few issues, of course. Certain HTML tags still need to be converted to WikiText (as I noted in the example in the wiki article) to reflect CSS options that otherwise do not trigger with the raw HTML code yet; this is something I can probably fix down the line. The other issue is that certain TiddlyWiki functions, such as integrated macros and lists, cannot be written inside org-mode because they contain square brackets that serve as links within org-mode.

Fortunately, it’s easy enough to fix those in the exported temporary HTML buffer before pasting back into a TiddlyWiki tiddler.

It’s been fun going back to TiddlyWiki and seeing some of the recent and exciting changes they’ve introduced. I will always have a soft spot for TiddlyWiki, since it was the first personal database I tried, before I discovered Emacs org-mode.

A quick rundown about how I write instructions in org-mode

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 20:56:12 -0400

On Reddit, someone asked how to write software documentation in org-mode, and I had a lot to say. Reddit, being Reddit, however, wouldn’t let me post my long comment. That’s fine, I don’t like spreading knowledge in silos anyway.

Here’s what I said:

Hi, my job involves writing technical documentation (instructions mostly), and I use org-mode for it all the time. I polished my process over the years, and it’s a loooong answer to a lot of stuff you probably didn’t ask, but I’ll try to break down the major parts.

First, I use Denote to write all my documentation, one file per tool or procedure if possible. Denote allows me to auto-associate files with keywords (for example, instructions for macOS vs Windows) and also shows me when I wrote the file automatically (it’s in the file name), so I know how old the information is. In the org-mode file itself, I often add notes using C-c !, an inactive timestep, so if there’s an update to a part of the instructions, I know what happened when. Something I don’t use for work but in my own notes is Denote’s dynamic blocks (a block of code with dynamic links to other org files), which serve as an index to quickly view related notes.

In the org-mode file, besides the Denote options, I add options in the meta part to get rid of TOC (table of contents) and display images inline: #+STARTUP: inlineimages and #+OPTIONS: num:nil. I often use annotated images, which I embed into the org file and attach to the headers (so the images are connected to the files).

A couple of years ago, I decided to adopt and use the Microsoft Style Guide (look it up, see if it’s for you) mostly to keep consistent. I don’t like Microsoft, but they have some documentations that make sense, and my work environment is Windows-based, so they cover what I need. There are other style guides out there; whatever you find, stick with it. The style guide is what tells you what words should be in bold (UI elements and buttons) vs what gets italicized (things you want to emphasize) or why you should use “select” over “click” or “tap” (because it’s more generic and applies to more UIs). It’s up to you how crazy you want to get. I find that it helps immensely, and it’s already become an integral part of my writing.

When I write in org, I often use comments (# followed by a space and the comment) as a reminder of what I still want to cover as ideas come to me under the paragraph I’m currently writing. For example, in this long post, I had a # what about images? under what I was writing until I got to it as a reminder.

I don’t use headers right away, unless it’s something obvious from the start, like an Introduction explaining what a certain tool is (first header) and then the process to use it (second header). I prefer numbered lists and quick steps in my instructions; each line describes one action, unless it’s something simple. I use links often - and here’s another important tip: I have (setq org-export-with-broken-links t) in my settings because org-mode expects nice normal links, but Microsoft products don’t always have them, and org-mode won’t let me export with what it considers broken unless I turn it off. I validate links later, in the finished product (by the way, always use target=blank in your links so when someone selects a link, it doesn’t hijack their window but opens another window or a tab).

I don’t use in-document links (anchor links, forget what they’re called) because these don’t always work well. It’s better to tell your users something like “for uninstall instructions, see header name below,” and let them go there. Anchor links are confusing and can break when you export.

When I’m done with my lists, I see if the sections make sense. I sometimes break into sub-sections, but if I go beyond 2nd level headers, I need to consider if I should expand into another article because it tells me the instructions are getting too complex.

I got to expand a bit more about Images. Using images is almost always better, as long as they are clear and use consistent annotations (write your own style guide). I prefer arrows over circles because I find they draw the eye better, and I like using callouts with text (like in speech bubbles in comics), pointing to what I’m talking about in the images. I try to use the same text from the instructions in the images. So if step 3 in the instructions says “select submit,” I will use a bubble pointing to that button in the image, and it will say “select submit” exactly the same way. There’s more to say about images, but this goes beyond org-mode, so I’ll stop here with this.

When I export, I use pandoc . I don’t like to use Emacs HTML exporter. The reason for that is that pandoc comes with more options and the ability to have a “template” Word document that will automatically stylize your document with the right colors, font, font sizes, etc. You tweak it once in Word and it’s good forever. I don’t like to use html from org-mode because it comes with a lot of extra “fluff” you need to strip away (it’s possible, you need to find the options in the Emacs manual and specify, I just got lazy), and also everyone at my workplace uses Word or SharePoint, so it’s just easier. I love Pandoc, and I highly recommend looking into it if you’re writing a lot.

I can keep going… There are spell checkers and grammar checkers (not the same thing), and Emacs doesn’t really have a good built-in grammar check, in my opinion. I blogged about Harper not too long ago, and it’s a good tool that can be integrated into Emacs (especially if you’re on a Mac), but if you’re writing for large audiences, you might need something better. There’s more to say about videos vs images, and depending on what system you store your articles in, it affects what you want to do there (or don’t want to do there), as in if it’s a wiki or a ticketing system or some other content management system.

But it’s time to grab some dinner.

If you have specific questions, feel free to ask. I love talking about these things if it’s not obvious!

Thinking about organizing my RSS stuff

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:42:30 -0400

Today, I stumbled upon Moly White’s Curate your own newspaper with RSS.

To the readers of this blog, there’s nothing really new here. RSS is how we have been reading our articles for a very long time. This is true (maybe especially true) for social media; I can see if there’s anything worth logging in for on Reddit before I expose my eyeballs to pesky ads. By the way, I just learned Bluesky offers RSS too, as they should.

However, reading this article and thinking more about how I read stuff made me realize that my current state of content consumption is chaotic.

I mostly read RSS feeds on my Android, because I just happen to have it nearby whenever I’m not on the computer doing something. It’s easy to grab when I need to use the bathroom or before I go to sleep. I know I’m going to read mostly interesting things because, as Moly says, it’s my own newspaper. But I also read RSS feeds on Emacs using Elfeed, and the feeds I have there are not the same as I have on Feeder. Meanwhile, I have another database in Feedly on my iPhone, which I use less, but still.

Having different feeds on different devices is problematic enough, but there’s another somewhat related issue.

Micro.blog, where I host my blog, is a special social network and a collection of blog-related tools on top of being a place to host this website. One of those useful tools I use all the time is the platform’s “read it later” tool, which they call “Bookmarks.” Saved articles in Bookmarks are stripped of ads and annoying pop-ups for comfortable reading (similar to “reader mode” in other browsers). They are also stored automatically in the cloud, so I can get back to them much later, even years later, and it would still be there with the relevant images and everything. Though different from RSS, there’s yet more content I want to read. If RSS is the newspaper, Micro.blog’s Bookmarks are the drawers of my desk, containing clips from all kinds of news outlets, blogs, even stuff like manuals for home appliances when I’m too lazy to put them in org-mode.

My content consumption is literally all over the place(s).

This morning I was looking into some solutions in the form of an RSS server which will work well with Elfeed in Emacs. The reason integration with Emacs is important (besides the obvious answer, “duh, it’s Emacs”) is that this is also where I write my posts. Ideally, I could follow up on everything I read from inside Emacs, find my comments about it, and write a draft. And guess what! I just found out that Micro.blog offers an RSS private feed to each user’s Bookmarks page. I shouldn’t be surprised when it comes to Micro.blog, RSS is king¹.

Having my devices “talk” to each other and figure out which articles I read and from where would be great, especially since I don’t necessarily have all my feeds in one place. For example, I follow Hacker News only on my iPhone, and my Android’s Feeder contains a few gems from Kagi’s small web RSS feed which I don’t have in Elfeed yet. I just need to figure out how to start organizing this mess.

Footnotes

¹ : not directly related, but on the topic of RSS: Micro.blog allows you to integrate RSS feeds directly into your blog, which in my opinion is one of its killer features. I mentioned it before, but my Movies and Games categories, where I rate both, are not even written on this blog; these are posts from my letterboxd and backloggd accounts, which integrate into the blog and look like my posts.

Denote with a different root directory on Linux only

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 06:54:59 -0400

As some of you may be aware, I prefer to keep certain things private, which means I don’t use cloud services for those. So, I wanted to have a dedicated folder for private notes on my Linux desktop, which doesn’t sync to my Mac. This sounds simple enough, but my setup makes it a bit more complicated.

For my technical documentations and blog posts, I use Denote, an excellent org-mode note-taking package from Protesilaos Stavrou (AKA Prot). By design, Denote is set up to have one root folder to work from with an option for subfolders under that folder for organization, which is what I have: ~/Sync/Notes/ is the main folder, and under it I have ~/Sync/Notes/Info and ~/Sync/Notes/Blog/, which should make sense if you’re follwing along.

~/Sync/Notes/ is under my Sync folder which is synced between my devices with Syncthing. Usually this is a good idea, since I want to have my technical notes and blog posts available to me both on Linux and on the Mac - and for that matter also on the iPhone and Android, but that’s a different story.

You’re probably starting to see the problem here. Denote is using a synced folder for its root folder, so I can’t have a “just for Linux” folder under normal circumstances. I wanted that private Linux-only folder to be at ~/Documents/private on my Linux desktop, and here we have yet another problem: the Mac has a ~/Documents/ folder as well, which I’m syncing to iCloud. Again, usually this is good: some of my work files are there, and I have a few settings saved. But if this folder was synced between my Linux and the Mac, these files will quickly be uploaded to Apple’s servers. Not good.

While Denote’s documentation notes that the upcoming release will have the option to define several folders as a list for denote-directory, this is not in production yet. So my first attempt took me through Syncthing documentation.

I knew I could ask Syncthing to ignore files using ignore patterns, and these are robust enough to work on folders as well. After a few attempts, I managed to have a ~/Sync/Notes/private folder on my Linux desktop that did not sync to my other devices.

While this works, it’s a weird workaround to have an isolated folder inside a folder meant for syncing; it’s kind of counterintuitive. Another concern: if the .stignore file with the ignore pattern was to be deleted by mistake, Sycnthing would sync that folder and its contents everywhere.

Digging deeper into my old Denote configurations, I found the solution in a Denote function that could solve it:

    (defun jr-private-denote ()
         (interactive)
         (let ((denote-directory (expand-file-name "~/Documents/private/"))
               (denote-excluded-directories-regexp "data")
               (denote-prompts '(title keywords))
               (denote-org-front-matter "
    #+title:      %s
    #+creator: JTR  
    #+date:       %s
    #+filetags:   %s
    #+identifier: %s
    #+STARTUP: inlineimages
    #+OPTIONS: num:nil
    \n"))
           (call-interactively 'denote)))

This function bypasses the regular denoate creation process (M-x denote) and changes the denote root folder to ~/Documents/private just for the purpose of this function. As well, I’ve included a few more options in the Denote front-matter, like the creator and the option to load images when the file loads. This function also excludes the /data subfolder under ~/Documents/private, which contains attachments, so I don’t create a note there by mistake.

This worked well, but it still leaves me with the problem I mentioned earlier. My configurations are stored in an org file synced inside my sync folder (so Emacs on my Linux desktop will run the same way as Emacs on my Mac, as much as possible), which means I could still run this function on the Mac, creating a private note in my Documentation folder there, and I don’t want a chance of that to happen. Besides, tweaking stuff is fun.

To fix that, I included a condition to help out:

    (defun jr-private-denote ()
      (interactive)
      (cond
       ((eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
        (let ((denote-directory (expand-file-name "~/Documents/private/"))
              (denote-excluded-directories-regexp "data")
              (denote-prompts '(title keywords))
              (denote-org-front-matter "
    #+title:      %s
    #+creator: JTR  
    #+date:       %s
    #+filetags:   %s
    #+identifier: %s
    #+STARTUP: inlineimages
    #+OPTIONS: num:nil
    \n"))
          (call-interactively 'denote)))
       ((eq system-type 'darwin)
        (message "You're using your Mac"))))

Now I have the Denote org file creation process dependent on a condition that I am running on Linux: (eq system-type 'gnu/linux). In case I’m running on Mac, (eq system-type 'darwin), I will only get a reminder that I’m using my Mac, and that’s it, nothing further will happen.

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:58:12 -0400

In Emacs, when you press M-y, you can go through all the recent text snippets that are stored in your kill ring (aka “clipboard” in modern-day programs) via yank-pop. In two seconds, I found what I needed from yesterday, and I’m ready to go.

Emacs is just like that, once you learn to use it. Two seconds, you get what you need (for me, usually in org-mode), and you move on with your life. Everything is tailored to fit you, the user. That’s what happens when a bunch of productivity geeks sit together and build a program.

Sure, not all (and even most) programs that are open source end the same way, but Emacs is unique. It’s a shining example of what happens when different people have different needs and are provided with open tools to answer those needs. I’m not a Lisp coder, but I know that when I need to change something or tweak it, I can, and I have all the help documentation and a community behind me to help achieve what I need.

Launching a script with a keyboard shortcut on a Mac?

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 19:17:01 -0400

I wanted to try out Eamcs Everywhere for a while, and today I finally took the plunge. The package is on Melpa, so installing it was a breeze, and it worked straight out of the box. The problem, as it turns out, is to get macOS to run the needed command (a script) with a keyboard shortcut.

The idea behind Emacs Everywhere is simple. When you visit a non-Emacs text window on your Mac (say you want to post something on blue sky or Reddit, perhaps answer an email from Mail), you invoke an Emacs frame and write whatever you need. Then, with C-c C-c, just like a capture template, you close that window, and the text you wrote in that Emacs frame is copied into the window you have open. It basically saves you a couple of copy-pastes.

I spent some good time researching how to get a keyboard shortcut to run a script. Most recommendations on the package itself recommend using a third-party app like Alfred, of which I’ve heard many good things. But I don’t want to get yet another app just to have an experimental Emacs package going.

The traditional macOS way seems to involve Automator. You create workflow in there, create the script (it’s just "emacsclient --eval '(emacs-everywhere)'" - oh and yes, it does require you have Emacs server running, which I do) and then call this workflow as a service from MacOS’s keyboard shortcuts, under settings. The problem there is that I don’t see the workflow I created. I know it’s saved, because if I right-click somewhere to open the menu and choose “services,” I do see it, but it just doesn’t show under my keyboard shortcuts.

I also asked the sage advice of JCS from Irreal, who directed me in the direction of icanhazshortcut. I like the look of this one: it’s an app with the single purpose of creating keyboard shortcuts to do different things - just what I need. But it doesn’t seem to work either - it simply crashes whenever I launch the shortcut I created. It doesn’t look like this app has been updated in a couple of years, so it’s possible some new macOS security feature blocks it somehow.

I’m surprised it’s so challenging to create a custom shortcut on a Mac that will just run a script. It’s the very basic of automation in my opinion. I’m probably missing something simple.

Harper: quick, light and private grammer check for Emacs

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 19:37:00 -0400

I got some time to spend with Harper, a “free English grammar checker designed to be just right,” which can be integrated into Emacs.

Before I proceed, I want to note that while the description on the website from the creator states, “you can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly,” I find this to be misleading. At least on Emacs on my Mac, Harper does not compare to what I get from my premium account on Grammarly¹.

Still, if you’re looking for something free, open source, private, and fast, you should check out Harper.

To get Harper to work on a Mac, you want to install it from Homebrew, as the documentations show: brew install harper. Then for Emacs, Harper uses harper-ls, which is the Language Server Protocol server (LSP) for Harper. This is something that tripped me earlier: on Emacs, you do not interact with Harper directly, but with Emacs’ built-in client for LSPs, Eglot, instead. Confused? I sure was. The part to remember is that we’re going to run M-x Eglot commands when we interact with Harper on Emacs.

A diagram would look something like this: Emacs > Eglot (LSP Client) > harper-ls (LSP Server) > Harper.

To configure Eglot to recognize and run with Harper’s LSP server, harper-ls, we can add the basic configuration to our Emacs init as described in Harper’s documentation, with a minor adjustment:

    (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
      (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                   '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio"))))

I’ve added the org-mode part instead of text-mode as described originally because I want Harper to work in org-mode. The credit for this goes to Jakub, who wrote about this in his blog and was also kind enough to email me directly and explain things even further when I was confused; so thanks Jakub! You’re alright in my book.

Jakub is from Australia, so he included a dialect option for Australian and a hook to launch eglot when org-mode is loaded, so that he wouldn’t need to launch it manually. Check his config in the link above with his explanations.

I changed my config’s dialect to American, as an option described in the documentation. After some time with Harper, I also decided to remove the org-mode hook because Harper will happily mark everything that looks like a mistake in org-mode buffers. This includes the agenda, checklists, code segments, etc.². I also prefer to separate my editing from my writing, as I find these green zigzags distracting.

When I launch Harper in org-mode with Eglot, it looks like this:

As you can see in the picture, I ran Harper on the draft of this post. It delimits every line with an issue with an exclamation point, then highlights the error with a green zigzag. When you hover over the grammatical error with the point (or the mouse cursor), Harper displays the error in the mini-buffer. In the case above, it lets me know I have a sentence that is too long.

You can correct mistakes directly with Harper by utilizing the correct Eglot commands (remember that you have to “talk” to Eglot to work with Harper). For example, you can use its Code Actions with eglot-code-actions, which will display a menu of available fixes to replace your text with. I’m quickly learning I should probably get a shortcut for this because I’m going to use this plenty. There are other aspects of Harper I’m still learning about; it comes with additional tweaks and configurations, including user dictionaries.

All in all, Harper does a decent job of catching most grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. However, I still find that I need to pass the text through Grammarly to catch some errors. For example, in this very post, the line where I wrote “It delimits every line with an issue…” was “It delimiters every line…” and Harper was okay with it. Harper also seems to miss my plural confusions, for example, “as an option described in the documentations,” is fine with Harper, but it should be “as an option described in the documentation.” Then there’s where, in my opinion, Grammarly shines next to other LLMs: style suggestions. I can ask Grammarly to make a part of the text shorter, more professional, more friendly, etc., and it will do so on the spot. Chat GPT and the like can do the same thing, but you have to do several copy-pastes to get to the same result, and even then, I find it’s not quite as polished. It’s also helpful to always have these versions in front of you so you can choose the style you want. Grammarly also highlights the errors it finds in different colors: definite issues will be in red, while suggestions for style will be in blue.

Many people don’t need this level of a “grammar nanny,” and I totally understand what Harper’s developers mean when they say Grammarly is overbearing. Add to that the fact that Grammarly sends all your private Emacs notes to the Grammarly servers, where they can do whatever they want with them, complete with the premium cost and… yeah, I totally get it. Meanwhile, Harper does most of the works, and fast, especially when compared to languageTool, which also requires you to install Java and deal with its weird updates. Oh, and those of you who use Obsidian: Harper has an official plugin, which I suspect works even better than what I wrote about here.

Give it a try, and if you’d like, let me know what you think. Meanwhile, I will see if I can make it my go-to grammar tool on my Linux Desktop.

Footnotes

¹ : I get Grammarly through work. If that weren’t the case, I’m not so sure I’d rush to pay for it myself, which comes close to $30 a month.

² : The reason Harper doesn’t know to ignore the org-mode syntax option for code (words between ~ ~) or other special characters is because org-mode is not yet officially supported. When this happens, I guess these issues will go away and I will try to launch Harper with a hook for org-mode again.

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 07:59:46 -0400

Installed Emacs again on Pop OS (I wiped it after my GPU issues), and now I realize I’ve had this weird issue in org-mode, where images are displayed in landscape mode. Some of my images are rotated 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Anyone familiar with this, what causes it, and how to fix it?

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:35:38 -0400

Discovered Harper in this blog post but not sure how to get it to work. Installed with homebrew, evaluated the default lisp they have on their site and… ~~ok, now what? I don’t see any Harper-related commands. Has anyone figured it out?~~

Short version: Harper is a frontend to Server Language Protocol (SLP). Emacs has a built-in SLP called Eglot. This means you use Eglot on Emacs to run Harper, so the interactive (M-x) command is Eglot (and it helps if you spell it correctly 🤦‍♂️). The E-Lisp configuration they have on their website (above) works fine, provided Eglot is configured to run and you have Harper installed.

I will expand later after I experiment some more.

Adjusting my org-mode workflow

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:22:13 -0400

One of the things that affects my workflow at work and Emacs recently is the source of my tasks and projects.

In the past, I worked almost exclusively with our ticketing system. My capture templates in org-mode contained properties for ticket numbers and user IDs to identify the users. Each task in org-mode I created this way included a scheduled date for that day, which I would move around later, depending on urgency.

This all went away when I moved to a more managerial position about a year ago, but it took me some time to realize that. My new position means that roughly 80% of my projects come from Emails while the rest come from meetings. I almost never have a ticket assigned to me directly, unless it has to do with my old position as a tech writer, which I still do now and then¹.

Habits die hard, and I was trying to fit email chains and meeting notes into my task templates in org-mode with limited success. For example, I was struggling to figure out what properties I need, since emails don’t really point a user with a problem, but often describe a situation that requires a solution.

Meanwhile, I was swapped away by Journelly (and for a good reason) and started to use it in meeting notes, but realized that I tend to keep these notes in a certain manner that would fit nicely into a capture template. These notes, which consisted mostly of bullet points and questions, did not fit well visually with the rest of the journal. More so, since I often write down things to do in meetings, I needed an indicator to flag those meetings later, when I need to go through the notes and re-write those as tasks². This quickly became cumbersome.

For my meetings then, I created this simple template (for more structured templates, I use org files rather than writing them directly into my settings):

    * MEETING %?
    %^T
    
    *Discussion:*
    -
    
    
    *To Ask:*
    -  
    
    
    *To Do:*
    - [ ]

I write the points in the meetings as people discuss them. As I listen, I come up with questions/comments which go below (I tend to write the answers as nested items below the questions with a “+” rather than a “-” to indicate an answer). The To Do part is newer, usually containing large items (projects) that need to be broken down further into dedicated tasks. This is still a work in progress.

As for emails, I still don’t have something solid. I mostly rely on my existing project template, but it doesn’t fit as nicely as the meeting template above.

Emails in Outlook are usually a mess of “conversations” by the time I get to read them. I then need to spend time on reading and understanding what’s going on, which is often an issue in itself, as people require urgent answers for complicated matters (Emacs is amazing, but I don’t think it can help me with that). I was looking into a way to identify emails by their email ID and use these as properties, but this is something that can only be done on the back end, which I don’t have access to. I probably need to spend more time with Outlook and its filters, and that’s a mess in itself, as Microsoft tends to change options and controls across its different versions. If anyone reading this has any advice, I’m all ears.

Ideally, Emacs projects stemming from emails should contain the email subject or another identifier (ideally in the header itself), then the people involved (the askers and the doers), location, and then resulting ticket numbers for the tasks created - but this is all flexible.

Footnotes

¹ : interestingly, my experience writing technical documents is helpful when I need to delegate work or explain a workflows in meetings - and org-mode is one of the best place I ever had to write such documents because it is an outline tool that breaks processes to steps by default.

² : For about a week, I used Journelly’s tagging system to tag certain notes as meetings, which helped me realize how ridiculous this was. Journelly is a place for me to see pictures of people I spent time with or capture ideas when I get a chance to stop and think a little, often by dictation. Meetings are nothing like these things, and they shouldn’t. It’s easy for me to write now, clear as day, but a few weeks ago I didn’t know.

compressing mp4 files while keeping better quality with dwim in Emacs

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:00:59 -0400

I mentioned Rameriez’s dwim tools, and it’s only natural to do some IT for fun when I rest from IT at work on the weekend, Right…? Eh, don’t answer that.

One of the important and excellent things about Rameriez’s package is that it makes it easy to build something custom of your own using the “Lego blocks” he provided with the package.

For example, one of the commands that comes with the package is dwim-shell-commands-resize-video, which lets you resize the resolution of a video (and through that, its size). It does the job well, but I wanted something that compresses videos while retaining their resolution for quality. I know how to do this directly with ffmpeg, so I thought I’d give dwim a go, and got something working pretty quickly:

    (defun jtr/dwim-shell-command-compress-mp4-fast ()
      "Compresses mp4 down further using slow preset."
      (interactive)
      (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
       "Compresses MP4s with libx265 using slow preset to bring down size"
       "ffmpeg -i '<<f>>' -c:v libx265 -crf 25 -preset slow '<<fne>>_compressed.mp4'"
       :utils "ffmpeg"))

There are a couple of things at work here with ffmpeg:

First, libx265, which is a newer decoder than the default libx264. The newer version does a better job at retaining video quality when compressing, but at the cost of compatibility; some older systems might not be able to play the resulting MP4 file or say there’s something wrong with it until you install the needed decoder. If you’re playing with ffmpeg regularly, you probably won’t have a problem - but the people you send these videos to might, so keep that in mind.

Second, the slow preset. This increases the time it takes ffmpeg to work on the video as it combs through the frames more carefully. I forget exactly what it does, but I believe it grabs a smaller group of frames each time, so more frame groups (hence more time) with different compression values.

Lastly, the CRF value is at 25, a bit less than the default 28 for libx265, so a bit less compression. I can probably push it up a bit further, but the above already reduces the file size dramatically.

Journelly is having me try a new perspective

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:35:00 -0400

A couple of people wrote back to me regarding my last post about the challenges I have with Journelly (which, again, don’t really have anything to do with the app itself, but my workflow).

In an Email, HTH let me know that while Syncthing is not officially supported on iOS, there is an app that works and does the job just fine: SyncTrain. I tested it, and it successfully synced my files to my iPhone, iCloud not included. That’s an amazing find.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about how I can better streamline my process of refiling Journelly’s entries to my journal, where they are… archived. Duh! I can simply use org-mode to archive entries into my journal file. All I need to do is define the file I want them to archive into in the file options at the start of the file. Journelly even has an archive feature built in, but since I want to save my entries off the phone, it won’t work for me.

However, I realized I might not want to send my Journelly entries away. Journelly is convenient, and I use it constantly for notes. Having these available on my iPhone (where Journelly has an excellent search feature with tags) and on Emacs on the Mac at the same time is a boon to my productivity, not to mention, it just looks so nice on the phone.

So now I’m considering a different mental approach. Instead of refiling and moving entries away from Journelly, I’m going to try and expand on what I have there later. Some of this I already discussed before: things like meeting entries, for example, can be copied later to my dedicated meeting file, and activities can be copied to my event file, if I feel there’s more to add. The missing piece is expanding on “mind dumps” in Journelly that go into tangents. For that, I want to break the ideas into specific subjects with Denote later. For example, if I write an entry in the morning about Journelly and I’m realizing I’m rambling about the app and have ideas, I can later put these ideas into a “Journelly thoughts” note later with Denote, along with the appropriate keywords and attachments, as needed. This, I think, also covers the concern I have regarding privacy and iCloud, as the Journelly entry will just cover the initial nugget, where I will write some key points which I will later develop in a dedicated note off Apple’s servers.

This is all pretty new and raw in my head, so I’m going to try that out for the rest of the week and see how I feel.

I wish I could use Journelly's new location features, but...

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 16:13:39 -0400

Journelly keeps getting updated with good features. One of the latest features I noticed (I’m not sure if it was part of the latest patch) is that locations tagged with entries can be revisited in iOS Maps from the app. This makes Journelly a good spot to save locations and integrate them with personal memories, to be revisited later on the map. I would like to use this (instead of, say, a saved of locations on Google Maps), but I can’t - for two reasons.

The first one, which I can work around, is that the list of entries on Journelly quickly becomes long, and finding where you were a couple of weeks ago requires some scrolling. While Journelly has a search option, I usually don’t remember the name of the place I’m searching for, which is why I’m searching for it in the first place. Still, I could probably look for who I was with at the time, or even better, use the tagging feature, which was introduced a couple of weeks ago, for, say, “#cafes” to filter down cafes only.

The other issue is more challenging: I don’t keep my notes in Journelly. I keep refiling my entries into my main journal file. That file, while still on my Mac, is not synced with iCloud. Call me paranoid, but I don’t trust Apple’s iCloud with my personal notes along with my pictures throughout the years. As far as I’m concerned, Apple just has a better PR department than Google and Microsoft, and they only care about their users’ privacy as long as it’s what looks good in the news. Because of that, I am not comfortable with Journelly being my archive of notes. There could be other options besides iCloud, but as far as I know, they all involve a cloud company somewhere. On Android and macOS, I still use the excellent Syncthing, which doesn’t involve any cloud storage. However, Syncthing doesn’t work on iOS, so I’m out of luck.

Besides these two issues (which have nothing to do with the app), the app is terrific. It’s amazing how polished and responsive it is.

Thu, 22 May 2025 11:10:59 -0400

Coffee time. I woke up wondering about .org-id-locations. You know, that Emacs file that keeps track of all of your org-mode IDs. How does it know where are the headers in the files it refers to? Is there a size limit? Can I use a different file (or files) if I want to for the hell of it?

What?? Don’t look at me like that. I often think about Emacs just before I fall asleep and when I wake up. Don’t you?

Thu, 15 May 2025 10:16:02 -0400

Two Eamcs tweaks I forgot about (most of you will know these):

Use Consult’s recentf to see a list of files that were edited recently:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-r") 'consult-recent-file)

Consult’s org-agenda (jump to heading) is quicker than what I usually do, which is to list all ACTIVE keywords in emacs (this is how I list my projects), and then go down the tree to find the specific TODO header I want.

Since I often know what I’m looking for within active projects, I can use consult-org-agenda, which narrows headers dynamically as I search. Much faster and clutter-free:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-h") 'consult-org-agenda)

Emacs' windows navigations and some Emacs zen

Fri, 09 May 2025 11:52:38 -0400

As I was looking more into widows management in Emacs, particularly viewing System Crafters’ video about the topic which I mentioned in my previous post, I learned a couple of things (or maybe re-learned? I probably used to know about them at some point in the past).

One of my issues with windows in Emacs right now is that whenever I open Dired, it takes over my current window. I often just want to view my files in the directory my current buffer is in.

The answer is simple: instead of opening Dired (C-x d), just “jump” into Dired in another window, which is dired-jump-other-window or C-x 4 C-j. This improves my workflows twice: first, I usually want to open Dired in the directory the buffer I’m working in is, and second, I want it in another window. With this command, I don’t need to specify the directory; it just takes me where I want¹.

Also, as I was writing this post, I realized another problem with Emacs windows placement was actually my problem all along (user error dance, anyone?): C-x b is bound to consult-buffer-other-window on my system, which does what it says, opening the buffer I want in the other window. I thought this was the command to open a buffer, forgetting that there’s such a thing as opening a buffer in the other window. Using the logic I just learned, it would probably make more sense to bind consult-buffer-other-window to C-x 4 b (for me, it runs the default Emacs switch-to-buffer-other-window, which I don’t use²) and then consult-buffer (which is not bound to anything for me) to be C-x b. This will disrupt my muscle memory for a while, but eventually it will lead to a better workflow.

Another nice thing I didn’t know and learned from watching this video is that I can scroll up and down in the other window while still keeping the focus on the current buffer with M-pgup and M-pgdn. This is nice if I want to read help documentation while working on something, reading definitions with Emacs’ built-in dictionary, or maybe using Occur or something similar, where just reading for reference is enough.

Then we have a built-in way to move between windows that I was looking for a while: windmove. Turns out it’s been there since Emacs 21, which means that for me, it was there all this time, and I didn’t know about it. Windmove lets you switch between windows using the shift and arrow keys by default, so that S-up would move you one window up, while S-down will move you down. You need to enable it and then enable its default keybindings, or assign it alternative keybindings.

Looking at these key-bindings, I can see why it’s turned off by default. Shift plus an arrow key is used extensively in org-mode, for example, so you can’t use these keys. Using something else, say, C+M+left or C+M+right, is not good either because on Linux, this will “swish” your workplaces (“spaces” in macOS), while the meta key plus an arrow is also taken by something else in Emacs… you get the idea, finding the keys to use is getting a bit problematic. You need to figure out what you can give up, or find a creative shortcut that works for you specifically. However, this seems too useful to pass up, so I think I’m going to dedicate keys to it very soon.

The video also goes over windmove’s sibling, windmove-swap-states-[direction], which switches the windows in the direction you tell it. So if I am working on this post in a window that is above a list of links I’m using as reference in the window below in another buffer, I can use windmove-swap-states-down to switch. Now I will be working in the lower window, and the list of links will be in the window above. This is good if I want my list of files in Dired to the window to the right, but dired-jump-other-window opened it in the window below, for example. Nice, it saves a few C-x 0 and C-x 1 maneuvers.

Then there are the external packages, of course. ace window is probably the most popular one, and this video provides a brief demonstration of it. The idea is that it numbers the windows for you on the screen, and then you select a number to jump to a window. Another package I learned about is winum, which is built on top of this idea, but it displays the window number in the minibuffer of each window all the time, and then it’s a matter of C-x # to jump to that window. It integrates into Emacs better in my opinion, and if you use many windows, it probably makes sense. I usually have no more than four windows open at once, so using the built-in windmove is probably better.

Alright, I’m off to rebind some keys and do some tweaking! Then we will see how much I need to mess with Emacs’s built-in logic for windows placement. It might just make a little more sense now.

Footnotes

¹: it’s building on dired-jump (C-x C-j), which opens dired in the directory the buffer I’m in. So, if I’m working on bills.org, which is under ~/Documents/personal/, dired-jump will open dired inside ~/Documents/personal/. The problem for me is that it will take over my current buffer (where I have bills.org open), which I don’t want; this is where dired-jump-other-window comes in: it will open Dired in a separate window.

²: this Emacs keys and windows management rabbit hole makes me re-appriciate Emacs’s default key binding. They’re there for a reason. They might not make sense at start… or maybe for several years, depending on how often and how much you use Emacs and what for, but now I see how C-x 4 is an entire family of key combinations tied to “other window” functions and then other key bindings start to make sense. For some of you veteran Emacs users, this might be obvious, but for me, that’s a slap on the forehead with a “Ohhh! So this is why this keybinding is like this!”

Mon, 05 May 2025 08:58:34 -0400

Windows in Emacs probably come to you as second nature now, as it does to me, but imagine how it looks to people from the outside for a minute:

Look at the diagram on the screen. Read the explanation. Look at the “huh?” expression of David of System Crafters (awesome channel for Emacs learning by the way)… Need I say more? 😂

I love Emacs, don’t get me wrong, but when it comes to managing its windows…

Emacs window management tweaking

Sat, 03 May 2025 10:52:32 -0400

I didn’t sleep well last night (it was too hot and humid for what I’m used to), so as a way to quiet my brain down, I turned to Emacs tweaking as always. This time, something that’s been driving me nuts for a while: Emacs’ way of managing windows.

By default, Emacs’ usage of windows doesn’t make sense to me. New windows open in seemingly random places, and modes that are supposed to help with the current buffer (like help for example) start out of focus, meaning you have to switch to them (C-x b) to scroll and read. When using several windows, this mess can quickly get out of hand.

To organize Emacs windows the way I want them to, I need to play around with display-buffer-alist. By default, its value is nil— meaning Emacs does what it does by default.

Micky has a good article explaining how Emacs prioritizes its windows by default and how display-buffer-alist works, while Port has a helpful visual tutorial with examples.

I like how Prot explains that an alist is a “list of lists,” so what we’re working with here is giving Emacs lists as guides as to how to display its windows. The way it works for each list is basically:

Define what is the “trigger” for a rule
Define what guides or functions to follow for that trigger
Define additional parameters (additional “tweaks”)

Here’s what I have so far:

    (setq display-buffer-alist
          '(
            ;; trigger: when the major mode is dired-mode:
            ((derived-mode . dired-mode)
            ;; guides: show me the above (dired) in a side window:
            (display-buffer-in-side-window)
            ;; paramaters: what side? right. How wide? .80:
            (side . right)
            (window-width . 80)
          ))
    )

This works, but it has a couple of functional problems.

In general, I prefer Dired to open to the right. I want to open another Dired window. In that case, I want it to open under the existing dired window. I usually open two Dired windows when I work with dwim for file functions, like renaming/moving files from one place to another. I doubt I’ll need to open three dired windows, but if I do, the idea should be the same: keep opening more Dired windows under the existing Dired windows.
The width is fixed, and I find .80 to be OK, but sometimes, this is too much, especially when the overall Emacs window (the frame) is already small. If I call Dired, I want Emacs to increase the size of the entire frame if it’s under a certain size.
I want to make sure Dired doesn’t delete or occupy other existing Dired windows, since that defeats the purpose of working with dwim. Each Dired window should have its own window, as I stated above: the first to the right, and the rest under the existing ones.

I’ve already been watching videos and reading for an hour and a half, and I’m getting sleepy again, so I think I’ll attempt to fill my sleep bank some more.

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:58:58 -0400

I love Emacs, org-mode, and Journelly.

Show thumbnails in dired so you know which pictures you want to resize, no problem.
Resize 20 pictures with dwim by mistake because you marked ALL of them. Oops.
No problem: dired-mark-files-regexp, mark all files that end with x750, delete with one keystroke
Round two, mark the ones you actually want this time.
Move them all to the download folder with one keystroke.

Then to organize all my journal entries from journelly.org to journal.org, sort them by the order in the journal, just mark them all and use org sort alphabetically. Poof, done.

A whole day full of notes with pictures is now organized in a way I understand, with work-related notes filed into their tasks neatly, with an org-id link connecting them to the meeting header I have tomorrow.

Can you be more organized than that? Show me one program that does all of that. I didn’t pay anyone, and the software is free.

A month with Journelly

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:31:16 -0400

I’ve been using Journelly on a daily basis for about a month now, and I wanted to reflect on how my current workflow affects my usage of Emacs in general.

As I mentioned in my post after the first week, I mostly dictate my thoughts to get them into text in Journelly; sometimes Scully speaks to her recorder as she performs her postmortem examinations.

Dictating like this, especially with my accent, is far from perfect; I’d say it roughly captures 70% of what I want to put down. It contains enough errors that I should do some quick review later in the day, especially if I want to develop these thoughts later or share them.

The other thing I do with Journelly is take pictures. Much like the dictation, these are rough and unedited, nothing like the ones I have in my photos section. A picture can quickly capture the mood and the event I’m in with the location in one quick glimpse, which works well with a journal.

Later in the day, usually before bedtime, I refile my Journelly entries into my big journal file. This is also when I transfer over photos from Journalley’s asset folder (which I host on an iCloud-shared folder on my desktop, as I explained previously) to my journal as attachments.

So far, I recaptured the proccess I more or less explained in my previous post. Not much changed. But let’s talk more about the details.

For the notes I take with dictation, I try to do at least minimal editing as soon as I’m done recording. I use Grammarly, which has a built-in keyboard app for iOS, and it’s usually good enough (after a short fight with it and iOS’s built-in spell checker on unique words and nicknames I use that don’t necessrily exist outisde of my own head) to make the entry usable - that is, to the point where I can reflect on it a year later without trying ot figure out what the I was saying.

If the entry contains something that needs a deeper intervention (for example, brainstorming or writing down notes after a meeting), I will try to do that later in the day when I get the chance or in the evening. To be honest, this part requires improvement. I leave too many notes that will confuse me later on.

For photos, I am shifting from using Photoshop to resize photos (from their default 3000 something pixel width down to 700 pixels) to using Ramirez’s awesome dwim tools - the same guy who created Journelly. If you’re reading this and you’re an Emacs power user and you don’t know about these tools, do yourself a favor and look at them right now. This post can wait. You’ll thank me later (and if you don’t believe me, check Irreal’s reviews of those as well)¹. With dwim-shell-commands-resize-image-in-pixels, it’s a matter of simply marking (m in dired) the images I want to resize (usually all of them), running the command to resize, and then attaching them withorg-attach-dired-to-subtree to the entry I’m reviewing in the other window.

Two challenges with the above: first, the file names created by Journelly have unique IDs, which tell me nothing about what’s in the picture. Second, as much as I try not to edit photos that will just go in the journal, sometimes I’m itching to crop or correct the color balance. Both of these issues have simple workarounds: I can use image-dired-display-thumbs to quickly see what the image are (the thumbs buffer convinently has a frame around the thumbs I’m viewing, which corresponds to the name of the file in the list of image files in the other buffer) and then I don’t care much about the name; and for the editting - I remind myself that if I like the picture, I should work on it and edit it in its original resolution and not mess with the low quality 700px wide version anyway².

As for refiling at the end of the day, this is straightforward enough. The only kink here is that my journal is built on a weekly date tree, which appends the most recent changes at the bottom of the file, while Journelly is doing things the opposite way and files the latest entries at the top (as it should). This means that when I capture something in my journal file through Emacs, it will be all the way down in the 2025 header, then all the way at the bottom for the current week number header, then again all the way down to the latest the day, and then once more, it will be at the bottom for the most recent entry. When I refile from Journelly, it works backwards, so I post the most recent entry at the top of that day header instead of the bottom, while the parents headers are still in a reverse order to that. Somehow, this works (at least for now), so I stick with it³.

Entries created by Journelly have the weather and location included in the properties drawer, something that’s missing from the entries I make directly to my journal with org-capture, but I can live with that. My journal template changed to look the same as Journelly’s, something similar to what I saw on Jack’s blog:

    * %U @ -
    %?

When I capture a journal entry like this through Emacs, I change the dash to add the location manually. I could get fancy with the OSM package for Emacs, which I have installed, but “home” or “office” or whatever place I happen to be in at the time is usually good enough (the temptation to create a capture template that integrates OSM into my journal entry “Journelly style” is there).

Lastly, I tried ot use Journelly more as my “brain dump” place for all my notes, including those for meetings, for example. The idea is solid, but the problem is that when I’m actually in a meeting, I have the org file with the meeting already open with the org-clock running, and adding notes to the log this way (C-c C-z) is a second nature at this point. Writing down quick notes this way feels different than writing down my thoughts in journal-style mode. I think it’s just a matter of time before I start directing all my capture notes into the journelly file so I just have one place with everything⁴.

Footnotes

¹: When Ramirez reached out to me and asked me how I was doing with Journelly (because he’s awesome like that), he mentioned his package could help with resizing photos in an email. It was another case where I heard about something, but it never really clicked. I’m becoming more of a fan of the guy and his work, but the tools speak for themselves.

²: another solution I’m leaning into: if I take a picture that I like, I can also lightly edit it on the phone (usually cropping and level adjustment or similar) and then attach it to the entry in Journelly

³: The manual refiling system I’m describing here is cumbersome and slowly starting to annoy me. It’s also prone to mistakes. I will be better off just starting a new journal file in a reverse order, that is, with the latest entries at the top. I believe org-mode has this option built in, and if not, I’m sure there are other tools like org-reverse-datetree out there. So why haven’t I done it yet? I don’t know. It’s a huge file (my biggest org file) and one of the most important ones, so messing with it feels kind of wrong.

⁴ : On a technical side, this may present a syncing problem. If I use Journelly this way, its file, journelly.org, will be synced between my Mac, my iPhone, and my Linux desktop - possibly also my Android. This can cause issues with syncing. Even iCloud is not perfect, and sometimes the file won’t sync, and I only discover this when I need to use the file, thus presenting changes on top of changes that were not yet synced, which will cause a conflict or loss of data.

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:23:00 -0400

On Linux, I now use Pop!_OS, which is dark by default. I find that ef-deuteranopia-dark looks better with my theme there. Meanwhile, on the Mac, ef-frost works for the light theme and ef-night for the dark theme.

Here’s what I do to make this as automatic as possible (F8 is mapped as the key to guggle from light to dark when on the Mac). These are Prot’s EF themes, including the function to switch.

    (cond 
     ((eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (ef-themes-select 'ef-deuteranopia-dark)
      )
     ((eq system-type 'darwin)
       (mapc #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes)
       (ef-themes-select 'ef-frost)
       (setq ef-themes-to-toggle '(ef-frost ef-night))
       )
     )

First week with Journelly

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:50:15 -0400

I’ve been testing out Journelly for the last week, and I have a lot of good things to say about it. Before we get there though, I want to start by explaining what it is - which is also the single piece of criticism I have about it at the moment.

Ramírez explains his app as “kinda like tweeting but for my eyes only,” which is true, but in my opinion, not the main point. After all, tweeting (X-ing?) or tooting or whatever is not new. At the same time, there are many excellent journaling apps for iOS, including Apple’s own Journal and the celebrated Day One. Putting Journelly against these apps is also misleading. This is partly why I didn’t understand the excitement around Journelly when I first heard about it, especially from an enthusiastic Emacs user¹.

I would take a step further and say that the average iPhone user, who trusts Apple for all syncing and backup needs and doesn’t know what Emacs is, should skip Journelly and go with the other apps, at least for now.

But, if you’re reading this post in your org-mode category on your RSS reader, you are not a regular citizen of the internet. We are Emacs org-mode users. So let me tell you why this application is amazing.

Journelly is a front-end iOS app for org-mode. The notes you take with Journelly are written entirely in org-mode, in a single org-mode file, which you can sync to your Mac with iCloud or another method that works with both iOS and macOS.

Every note you take, which you create by tapping a large “+” sign in the app, starts with an org-mode header made of a time and location (which you can disable), like so:

* [2025-04-08 Tue 14:28] @ 123 Sesame St

On the app, these entries look very polished:

Behind the scenes, Journelly also adds the following in the header’s properties drawer (I removed the values below, but Journelly populates them automatically):

    :PROPERTIES:
    :LATITUDE: 
    :LONGITUDE: 
    :WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 
    :WEATHER_CONDITION: 
    :WEATHER_SYMBOL: 
    :END:

You won’t see these properties (including the weather, which is included in the app when you take a note) on the app in the default view, but you can switch views to the “Markup” to see raw org-mode syntax. Speaking of org-mode syntax, let’s talk about some Journelly magic.

I use iCloud to sync a Desktop folder for org files to my Mac. This is also where I told Journelly to store its org file (which is called Journelly.org - at this point, it doesn’t seem like you can change this file name). This means that after making an update in Journelly, I can visit the org file with Eamcs on my Mac within seconds.

Then, through Emacs, I can make whatever changes I want to this org file: fixing typos, adding emphases (say, make certain words show in italics or bold), adding links, whatever. The next time I launch Journelly on my iPhone, it will notify me of the file change and prompt me to reload it. One tap and everything is rendered with the same polished look you see above as if I wrote it from within Journelly itself. The whole thing is so freaking seamless and visually appealing it’s addicting, as I found out quickly.

Since Journelly’s org file is included in my org-mode agenda (the folder it’s in is defined in my agenda files in Emacs on the Mac), I can easily refile entries from Journelly.org into my big journal.org file which I’ve been updating since 2018. This means that notes I take on the fly, with timestamps and location (and weather!) data, are added to my journal within seconds. After doing this for a couple of days, a thought occurred to me: why stop there?

As you can see, Journelly knows how to deal with photos well. They are stored in an images folder inside Journelly.org.assets, which is easily accessible if you sync the app’s org file. So, if it’s so easy to use for notes and pictures, why not use Journelly for my project notes and meetings?

My favorite way to work with Journelly so far is by dictation: I talk to write. This last part is what caused me to change how I think of project notes in general. Instead of writing notes for each project in Emacs, why not just write or dictate them in Journelly? I can easily refile headings into related projects later if I wish, whether it’s a work task, a personal journal entry, or a link from the internet.

I don’t have to think of what goes where as I take notes. it all goes to one place where it’s easy to see and a pleasure to work with. This concept is not new to me (and it’s well documented in productivity systems like GTD as “inbox” or what have you) - I used to have an OhSnap.org to capture everything. But on my phone, through Orgzly on Android or Beorg on the iPhone, it’s not easy to see nor a pleasure to work with. These apps are geared toward tasks and to-do lists, and that’s part of the problem: when I capture information, I don’t usually know if it’s a task yet, just a note, a workflow, and where it goes. If I do know, then I’d put this task directly into the org file it belongs, so what’s the point? And it all looks so bland and boring and uninviting. On other org-mode apps, writing notes is a chore.

Journelly blows this mental challenge away. It invites me to take notes and just notes. It’s the opposite of a chore. “Go ahead,” it winks at me, “spill the beans. Snap some pictures. We’ll work on the details later.” Suddenly, I’m free to let my mind go.

Later on Emacs, I refile personal headers with their notes into my journal, minutes from meetings into my project files, and use org-attach to move the images from Journelly² to their correct place where they are also stored for backup.

This makes me wish Journelly would have the ability to attach voice memos, which would work great in a journalling app. I hear from Ramírez this is on his list and will come soon (judging from how responsive he is, we won’t wait long). Who knows, perhaps other files could be added, like video clips and even PDFs for flight or train ticket scans. For now though, the app is still in beta, and Ramírez is working overtime to get version 1.0 out. I will be one of his first customers, that’s for sure.

In the few days I’ve used Journelly, it has transformed from a nice way to keep a journal to an essential mind dump tool for saving anything I need. I now reach for my phone whenever I want to capture thoughts because it’s just so pretty and easy. If you’re an org-mode user on an iPhone, I highly recommend you give it a try as soon as it’s out.

Footnotes

¹ - I do tend to miss details, and while the Mac Observer review I read does mention Journelly is based on org-mode, it’s somewhere toward the bottom where my quick scan of the article missed.

² - at this point, Journelly stores full-resolution images, which can quickly add up in space on the iPhone. This is easy to resolve with a Shortcut on iOS or a script with ImageMagick. I prefer to do some slight editing to my images anyway (a bit of cropping, some levels adjustments, etc), but these are also things you can do on the phone and automate the compression.

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:09:00 -0400

I want to write more about Journelly, but the problem is that it’s too effective at what it does. Creating notes with it is so easy and streamlined that it’s starting to change my entire workflow for project notes, and that’s a pretty big change.

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:50:28 -0400

Another quick note about Journelly -

Álvaro Ramírez was kind enough to grant me access to test the app after I found out it’s based on org-mode.

I just started playing around with it but so far I’m impressed, particularly with its ability to “talk to” Emacs back on my Mac. I can easily edit notes that I created on the phone, and these edits, including links, strikethroughs, and lists, show up on the app in turn.

There’s more to explore and the app is still in beta, so I will give it a couple of days before I write something more thorough.

Correction about Journelly

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 22:13:06 -0400

When I wrote about Journelly the other day, I didn’t expect the guy who makes the app to find me and my post, and answer my post on his own blog. It surprises me every time I get an email or a response because I don’t really think anyone really reads this blog.

It makes sense that some Emacs folks on Fosstodon would find me, sure, we’re all crazy for the same thing after all, but then I also get email from people who take the time to write in length and open up more, and I just feel this semi-guilt of, “hey, why are you reading my stuff, I’m just talking nonsense.”

My most popular posts (I use TinyLytics to track traffic, it’s by an independent developer, and it just tracks the essentials, like general geographical location and browser used to read what pages) are Emacs and org-mode related, without a doubt, but there are other posts here as well. As time passes, I open up about more things in my life, or I care less about what people think, or probably a mix of both - and I’m also getting comments about those here and there. That’s especially exciting to me.

First, there’s some sense of vindication in that (if you grew up being somewhat on any social spectrum, you’ve probably experience enough of “you are wrong and you need to do X because X is what the rest of the world is doing” kind of thing). Second, these communications are always more personal and human. Emacs communications is great too, but it’s more of the thrill of learning a new thing.

Back to Journelly. I owe both Irreal and Álvaro an apology. Not that what I said was negative criticism in any way (and if it was, I didn’t mean it that way) - it’s just that I didn’t do enough research to learn about the app. I just read the review linked from Irreal, which didn’t really highlight the fact that the app is based on org-mode. That’s a big DUH, folks! Álvaro also created Plain Org, which I’ve used, among other useful Emacs surprises!

Journelly and org-mode

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:53:00 -0400

Irreal likes Ramírez’s Journelly. To each their own, sure, but after I read the review he mentioned, I’ve been scratching my head a bit. I don’t get it.

Irreal is a dedicated Emacs user, and I estimate he uses more Emacs in his day-to-day functions than I do - so why does he feel the need to use something that is not Emacs for quick notes?

One of my theories is iPhone usage. That’s probably a big one. Using org-mode on an iPhone is not easy. There’s Beorg, but it’s geared more toward task lists and calendars than taking notes (even though you can do that, especially if you have templates). Even better, you could include a timestamp every time you record a new note, which is one of Irreal’s needs of his requirements. I’m not sure if he wants to include voice recordings or dictate notes on his iPhone, but both of these things are pretty easy to do - exporting an audio note and attaching it to a header in org-mode is pretty straightforward and can probably be automated.

My issue with any such apps, especially if they’re meant to capture “everything” (like pictures, short videos, oral notes, etc.), is that pretty soon they start competing with org-mode. What follows is confusion about what I put where which is usually followed by a short burnout of using either one. Then I have a period when I don’t save anything, and I regret it later.

org-mode is not perfect, but as long as I use it, I have one place where I know I can find whatever I need. At work, I usually keep detailed notes of what I did under each header with timestamps, even if they are just a few lines long. It’s more than just recording information: the act of writing clears up my head and helps me figure out what goes next, and the “emotional memory” (for lack of a better term) reflected in the mood of my notes helps me remember things later that I didn’t think of actually writing down. I can find old records this way, even if they happened years ago.

As I already said, to each their own. We all get to choose what tools we want to use. This is not about preaching; it’s just that his use case makes me put my Emacs thinking hat on and think about what I would do. These scenarios are interesting to solve.

I’d love to write him an email or comment, but I can’t find an email address, and the blog’s commenting system uses Disqus, which doesn’t let me log in with any accounts I want to use. Oh well. Maybe he will find this post.

Emacs 30.1 so far

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 10:34:44 -0400

Upgrading Emacs is always a project, especially on macOS.

I’ve been using Emacs Plus on my Mac since I installed version 28, but when I went to update to version 30.1 through homebrew, I got a cryptic git error. From the little research I did, it has to do with commits being in the wrong place. The explanation was something that went over my head, so I shrugged it off and tried Emacs for macOS again. I forget what was the reason this Emacs flavor wasn’t for me in the past, but it seems to work fine now. Well, after I deleted and reinstalled marginalia, exactly as Irreal mentioned. Seems to be working fine now.

I was excited about completion-preview-mode (if Mickey is raving about something, you got to check it out), but so far, in my experience, it’s just “meh,” at least out of the box. After I got it to work in org-mode (the manual is a bit of a mess and seems to be thrown into the package itself, but I found out what to do in this YouTube video) it’s not much better than what company-mode gives me at the moment, so I’m going to wait until someone probably comes around with “actually, it’s much better because X, and you can find out how to do it over at Y,” or Mickey writes something more complete. The video I mentioned goes into some helpful examples, but I get lost in terms of how to set it up in my case.

Then, again per Mickey, There’s “The Org URI protocol should now register automatically, meaning you can send data from a browser bookmarklet straight into org capture in your running Emacs instance.” I remember I once got it (or something similar) to work with org protocol, but a native option turned on like this seems very good, and I’d love to be able to send text and links from my browser directly to Emacs. I’m not sure how to get this to work either. I recall I need to run Emacs as a server in the background and then launch Emacs as a client, but this is beyond my current macOS kung fu. The issue with finding how is usually knowing what to look for. I need to be more specific about my research, but i’m not sure what it is I’m looking for.

Upgrading Emacs is always rewarding because I also get to upgrade my brain with it. I learn how to do new things, and do them more effectively. I’m sure I’ll be back at tweaking pretty soon.

back in the groove

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 10:56:39 -0400

As I’m getting back into the “groove” of things, I started this pattern:

Wake up. Switch to home clothes from PJs.
Go to the kitchen, get some water, listen to the birds and think for a bit (about 10 mins)
Exercise: stretches (mostly focusing on back and posture), with some push-ups and crunches.
Meditation (5 mins) follows exercise
Back to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast
Eat, take vitamins, talk to Nat as his morning starts as well
Start working:
1. View the agenda for the day (meetings, major projects, TODOs)
2. Looking for Pinned emails from previous days and Reminders, combine them into TODOs for the day
3. Start tackling tasks in my agenda (emacs org-mode), recording what I’m doing in notes
Around 13:00 to 15:00 (depending on meetings and things), time to exercise, or if I’m in the office, go back home for this. No targeted goal specifically yet; it’s mostly about the routine, but I’m trying to include a jog here if I can, or weight lifting
Back to work: this is a good “quiet time” to work on projects without interruption, depending on meetings.
Around 18:00 or 19:00 finishing work. Nat’s back at that time, or I spend time with another partner, depending on the day.
Around 20:00, I enjoy a show (these days it’s Silo) or video games (Helldirvers2 mostly at this point, but there’s also the excellent Mind over Magic I need to review soon)
I usually sleep around 22:00 or 23:00. Hopefully I can keep up the 7 hours of sleep I get a night or so, which means I wake up around 6:00 the next day to start again.

There are many points that change in this workflow (for example, if I blog, it’s usually in the morning at some point after food, if work allows), but in general, this is the outline I try to get back to.

Once again I see the benefits of channeling all my tasks that come from emails, reminders, my calendar, phone calls, meeting etc - into my org-mode agenda, where I have one simple list without distractions of what I need to do. If it’s not there, I’m not doing it that day. And there’s always more than I can finish each day anyway, that’s just the nature of things.

The big benefit (I’ve said so many times in the past) here is that because I log what I do, I know exactly what was done and I have a good idea of what needs to be done next. This is also very useful when there’s a new project, and you can just use the template from last time. Good stuff.

More Emacs would be nice, but...

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:54:42 -0400

Earlier this morning, when I was up between my sleep phases, I was looking for some Emacs content through irreal, one of the most prolific Emacs blogs out there. Irreal publishes a post every day, and these posts usually summarize and link other Emacs-related posts to other blogs. It’s easy to find blogs with good Emacs stuff and check their archives for even more Emacs. That’s the life of an Emacs user - learn it, tweak it, find another cool thing you haven’t thought about, learn it, tweak it…

I would like to have more Emacs in my life, but unfortunately, it’s not easy.

My blog archives are full of complaints about Microsoft products and web tools that I have to use because of work. I can’t use email in Emacs because logging into Office 365 for work is restricted, and no other apps but Outlook can access it (not even Apple Mail). ServiceNow, the platform we use for IT tickets, has an API, but it’s also heavily restricted, forcing us to use the browser. Communications and phone calls happen on Teams, another closed Office 365 application. It’s not even just Microsoft specifically, even though I like to blame them: it’s the cloud.

I work with different IT departments, engineers, and managers. Usually, when app X doesn’t answer certain needs, the solution is to find a new app, which in turn is also integrated in the cloud with its own restrictions. This happens so many times that we don’t get the chance to explore the depth of one app before there’s another one. Each person brings his own new favorite app to add to the party.

I’m guilty of this too, on a personal level. I love writing in Emacs, but my favorite writing companion, Grammarly, doesn’t work with Emacs (yes, I know there were some packages for it in the past; they were abandoned, and as far as I know, Grammarly doesn’t have a working API anymore). Micro.blog uses its own macOS app for writing content, which brings convenient integration to my other content (like my photos and saved bookmarks) that I don’t currently have in Emacs, so I just copy-paste my posts into it these days. Even good tools like being on my iPhone are not as fluid as Apple Reminders or Notes, and it’s just easier to start something there and have the discipline (this is the weak link) to bring it all back into Emacs later.

Still, despite all of that, I love working in Emacs. It brings me peace that no other app does at this point because it’s entirely mine. I know where everything is, I know how to tweak it (or I can learn how to), and I can access its org files everywhere, even if I don’t have Emacs installed. No other application organizes my life and projects so well and for so long, and I don’t see anything replacing it in the near future.

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:18:04 -0400

After yesterday’s issues, today I split my now.org into four different files: personal projects, work projects, work meetings, and blog projects.

Thinking about how to organize the projects in those, I rediscovered org-sort. I think I’m on to something.

How I handled projects in Emacs org-mode in 2024

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 10:57:28 -0400

I mentioned my projects file, now.org, is getting a little bit out of control. I’ve been playing around with a few ways to organize it since.

This is firstly a conceptional problem, one that has to do with how I organize things mentally before I can go into the technical level of how to tell Emacs to do it: a “what do I want to see?” question before a “how do I do it?” one.

Let me start by showing you what my project file looks like now:

As you can see, a lot is going on.

One of the issues that are already fixed in this image is having the “DONE” or “CANCELLED” projects at the end of the file. This looks more organized than having them mixed with the “ACTIVE” projects all over, and it also allows me to focus on the things I’m currently working on as soon as I open the file.

By default, org-mode adds newly created headers at the bottom of the file. This means that every time I add another project or a meeting (an “ACTIVE” or “MEETING” in the image), it goes to the bottom of the list, right under the last header. I have to fix this manually by standing on the header I just created and moving it up with (M+↑) all the way to the top. However, I recently looked for a solution and found it: adding prepend: t to my capture templates. This reverses the order, so this problem will automatically sort itself out.

In my image, you can also see that some headers start as “Project:” and then the project’s name. This is redundant, and I hope to get rid of this soon because anything that is marked as “ACTIVE” is a project - which is defined by having sub-tasks (marked as “TODO”) under it; the idea is that a project is a large undertaking that has to be broken first to manageable parts:

I write notes under each one of those sub-task headers (as you can see under the first one). I also find it helpful to attach relevant files (in this example, the Reserved IPs header has an Excel sheet containing details). I find that it’s easier to find files through Dired on Emacs than it is looking for them in my work’s OneDrive because they are tied to the project in the right place and arranged by date at the same time by my header’s ID (I changed that from random slugs to date-formatted IDs in the past). I can also jump directly to the directory with those files with C-c C-a F, and then use the open command on macOS (M-x !open) to open it with the default application.

Most of the projects in both images have a percent to completion next to them. Since I usually don’t know what a certain project requires to complete when I start it (what subtasks are required or how many), this is more of a general guide, if anything. Still, I like knowing how much of a project is already done. The percent cookie is an feature built into org-mode¹.

Not in the images yet are emojis. I’m playing with the idea of including a small person emoji (🙋‍♂️) in “MEETING” headers to make them stand out a bit more. Meetings, as it turns out, are a special kind of project. It’s a place where a lot is going on at once, and I mark a “MEETING” as “DONE” only after all the actionable notes are distributed to tasks. Meetings can include tasks that start a whole new project or fit into existing ones. It’s also possible to meet about a certain project, so the “MEETING” header needs to be refiled under an existing project later as one of the subtasks. Meetings can take a long time to break down and follow up on, making them a project in themselves: this is why I found that giving them a dedicated keyword is a good way to handle them².

Another thing I added to the projects’ capture template is clocking in as soon they’re created with :clock-in t. I often forget to clock out later, but I want to keep trying and build this as a habit. If I create a clock with a project, Emacs creates a :LOGBOOK: line for me with the time I started working, and I can correct the hours later. This is another area where it’s more of a guide than critical information: it’s often inaccurate (because I forget to clock out and then in again), and also, it doesn’t matter to me if I work half an hour more or half an hour less on something. It’s more of an indication of how much time a certain project took and how often I worked on it during the week.

Projects are also tagged with people I regularly work with. I know some folks (and I get to know many more) personally. When this happens, it’s helpful to see recognizable projects and tasks tagged with names I know. Since tags are hereditary in Emacs, an entire project can be tagged with a person if it’s required, but usually, I need different people for different subtasks of a certain project, depending on what I do. This is helpful to see how much I am working with a certain person, what on, and what that person does. I also have another file for people I work with, along with their names, their ID, their department, and what they do; it’s my useful “I know a guy” file I can tap into when I need someone to do something or when someone else asks me if I know how to handle a certain thing. I then can say, “I don’t, but I can find someone who can for you.” Helpful.

I can add a couple more things here, but this is probably a good place to stop. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment! I’d love to hear from you.

Footnotes

¹: It’s also worth noting that half of the time, I need to “re-ACTIVE” a project marked as “DONE” because of a new development or because it would happen again and might become more of a routine. This means new “TODO” tasks are added below, and the percentage goes back down from 100%, so, yes, this is more a visual guide than anything concrete.

²: I use at least two (but sometimes more) datestamps in a “MEETING” project. The first time stamp is usually before the meeting takes place: this is where I write down a list of bullet points I want to bring up and discuss. The second timestamp takes place during the meeting (I type while people talk, and I ask them to slow down or wait if I need to (by the way, this is something that worked horribly for me with a notebook: my attempts and my attempts at something that looks like handwriting in meetings while rushing were laughable at best. I missed critical points that way). The second timestamp then becomes an indication to look for actionable items later. Since I write these notes in bullet points, it’s also easy to copy them back into Outlook with minor editing to leave a summary or meeting minutes later.

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 19:36:13 -0400

my Emacs projects file (which I call now.org) is becoming too big. The agenda is still snappy, and I can work with it, but it just looks like a pile of “stuff” that I need to do or did. I want to organize it better somehow…

#emacs #orgmode

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 08:35:41 -0400

I just typed away in my journal for an hour:

Region has 32 lines, 16 sentences, 1574 words, and 8124 characters

Man, I have to use more periods. Too many run-on sentences.

Not something I could do in my handwritten journal. It would take me a week, especially if I want to be able to actually read what I wrote, and not have crazy cramps in my right hand.

I still want this to be physical somehow… maybe I should just print it? I don’t know.

Filtering org-agenda to exclude a category

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:51:58 -0400

Back in July, I explained how I use Beorg to sync my calendars. To recap, Beorg continuously exports the iOS calendar into a read-only org file, which I then sync to my Mac’s desktop through iCloud.

The calendar.org file shows on my Emacs agenda, where I can see both my Outlook (work-related) meetings and my Gmail (personal) events. This is very nice, but because the calendar.org file is read-only (as it should be—it keeps being overwritten by the Beorg every time the iOS calendar syncs), I can’t use it for anything besides this visual information.

If I want to create a project from a meeting and add notes and sub-tasks, I have to copy the event from my calendar.org file to Now.org, where I keep my current projects and tasks. There, I can add notes and headers.

But then there’s another problem: when I copy my headers over to Now.org, my agenda shows duplicates - one event header comes from calendar.org, and the other comes from Now.org after I copied it there. Here’s what it looks like:

When I start my day, it’s important that I see calendar.org so I can copy over details to now.org. Once I’m done, however (clearing the Calendar tag, adding a keyword like MEETING, and cleaning the text under the header from details I don’t need), I no longer need to see calendar.org, and I want it to disappear.

I was looking around for a solution to this problem, and of course, it was right under my nose. Org-agenda comes with the option of narrowing down (filtering) the agenda to a category at the point with <. What I didn’t know is that C-u < does exactly what I want: the opposite of the above. It hides the category selected. Problem solved.

Irreal on my writing habits

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:59:19 -0400

Irreal commented on my recent posts about writing (analog vs digital). Irreal doesn’t understand why I’m hesitant:

To be honest, I don’t understand his ambivalence about the matter. He lays out the case for both and shows that, except for a vague feeling of attraction to writing with pen and paper, the digital method is more efficient and satisfying. The digital product is so much more useful and flexible that it seems there should be no question as to which to use.

Spoken like a true sysadmin. But he’s mostly right.

Pen and paper convey an intimate feeling and a connection to what I write that I can’t get out of typing on the keyboard. It’s not about how fast or clear it is. But that’s the thing, it’s a feeling. At the end of the day, if I need to capture information and have it available to me whenever I need it, digital wins by a large margin.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve started to reap the benefits of returning to digital and fully utilizing org-mode.

Meetings notes full of details, organized by date and time; Projects I’m working on are broken down to smaller manageable tasks; floating emails and quick reminders quickly tie into a workflow that I can find later and connect to a system and don’t get forgotten or lost. I can slowly breath again, and I’m starting to find the fun in work again.

Meanwhile, I’m also able to write more on personal events. I don’t have to fully reflect on every event, as I would do in the hand-written journal. Instead, I now have an option of including a list of places I visited with a friend last night or perhaps a picture showing a fun activity. Sure, I could do that in my written journal, but it feels too special: I don’t want to “waste” the page on a simple list of locations. Digital just makes more sense for that, since my agenda with its events listed with details is not the same as my journal.

I don’t know, I guess we’ll see. I do miss the idea of the written journal just enough to pick it up again sooner rather than later.

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 17:43:27 -0400

New emacs org-mode category in place…! Actually, it was there for a while, but now it’s in the navigation bar, complete with my own AI illustration of what the Emacs GNU looks like. Check it out: taonaw.com/categorie…

Digital Notes vs. Analog notebook

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 13:19:00 -0400

The other day, I needed to copy some notes from my pocket notebook to my project file in org-mode, which is synced to my iPhone with iCloud. I was on the subway on my way downtown with a friend.

I played around with Beorg, which allows me to work with org-mode files on the go. Not only did I manage to get all the items in, but I also figured out how to display my active projects on the app so they show neatly on my weekly agenda.

It was relatively painless to transfer my handwritten notes into the file. I was also able to add a few more to-do items with the app, something that would be nearly impossible to do with my notebook on a moving and shaking train. My handwriting is terrible enough as is.

When I got home, the updated file with the tasks was already waiting on my Mac, synced.

I spent my reading time in bed reading into Beorg’s documentation. I was excited but also conflicted. Should I even bother with my pocket notebook when capturing notes with my phone (and watch, with Reminders) is so easy? Is there any sense in transcribing and deciphering my handwritten notes into dates and checklist items when those can be created semi-automatically for me?

The speed alone, not to mention the clarity and search capability, would increase my productivity to a new level—one that I definitely need at work right now.

Back to digital journaling once more...

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 04:29:10 -0400

For the last week or so I’ve been journaling on my computer again instead of in my notebook. This is a cycle for me I keep going through.

The urge to write in a handwritten journal is there, and I love the feeling of sitting down at a desk with a good pen and paper pages. The problem I’m having is the amount of details I need to put in—and with it, the time I need to spend on writing—and the references I need to make while writing.

Unsurprisingly, the culprit is my work. There are so many to-do items each day that, combined with my personal tasks, Start to cause me to lose track of the big picture. While I still have my projects organized in big bullet points with all the references I need in org-mode, I am missing the “so, what does this make me feel?” aspect of it all—the reflection of looking back on what I did last week or last month.

This is where my written journal would have fit in, but a written journal cannot link to my projects directly. Meanwhile, when I want to write about a fun hangout I’ve had, I want to include a list of places and map snippets, and while I can do that in my notebook, I just don’t have the time to find the locations, write down the addresses, and print out maps snippets - all are things I do within minutes in my digital journal.

Another issue is that my hand cramps if I keep writing for a long time, especially as I start writing faster or get excited. My handwriting becomes sloppier and I can’t fix my spelling mistakes without crossing out a word. Sure, I can use write out (or Tipp-Ex, depending on where you’re from), but that introduces even more time and more friction.

I started to realize that instead of just writing, the first thought I have is if I should write, where, and when. The option of taking out a personal notebook filled with intimate details is not realistic in most cases most of the time, so I can only reflect on my day at specific times that I don’t always have or want to spend on something else. I miss the availability of “just writing” what I need.

Ironically, I use a notebook, my pocket one, to write quick ideas or summaries. Again, it comes down to speed: taking my pocket notebook out of my pocket with my pen to write something down is faster than doing it on the phone.

So I guess I came a full circle. Journaling is digital, and quick ideas I want to capture are handwritten in a notebook. 📓 🤷🏼

Emacs-plus PATH in macOS Sequoia

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 09:48:51 -0400

Important: this is for emacs-plus for macOS via Homebrew.

After the upgrade to macOS Sequoia, Emacs’ Dired didn’t find gls, which made it impossible to navigate to folders and open files this way. When a program can’t find another program, it’s usually a sign something is wrong with the path environment.

On Mastodon, Jumile directed me toward a discussion about a similar error on Github. Seems to be a path issue indeed, from what I can tell. Something with PATH injection in Emacs (I don’t know what this is yet, but from the name, I get a vague idea. This seems to be an interesting read)

Two solutions and a workaround.

The workaround is to launch Emacs from the terminal, which loads the environment correctly.

Something more permanent is manually doing what emacs-plus does automatically: copy and apply the PATH in the init file, as explained in the GitHub above. To do that, you want to go into Info.plist inside the Emacs package: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/emacs-plus@[your version number here]/[version number]/Emacs.app/Contents and locate the PATH string (search for “PATH”). On my system, it looks like this:

<string>/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/System/Cryptexes/App/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/local/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/appleinternal/bin</string>

And copy it into the init file, telling it to set the environment like so:

(setenv "PATH" "/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/System/Cryptexes/App/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/local/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/appleinternal/bin")
(setq exec-path (split-string (getenv "PATH") path-separator))

Something even better came from David Hagerty: exec-path-from-shell. This package is “copying important environment variables from the user’s shell: it works by asking your shell to print out the variables of interest, then copying them into the Emacs environment.”

I tested it out, and it works as advertised. This is a more reliable solution than copying the path manually each time, though it’s important to understand what’s going on and what it does.

On Reddit, slashkehrin added the actual path issue on Github.

What is or why Emacs?

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:38:00 -0400

My “Emacs day” is July 11, 2018. Or in org-mode, it looks like this: [2018-06-11 Mon]. As I noted last year at that time, it is the day I wrote my first official journal post in Emacs org-mode, and the rest is history. I’ve been a daily Emacs user since that day.

Both my partners joke about Emacs. NK calls it “Immaculate.” When I asked them this morning to guess what I was going to write about, they rolled their eyes and nailed it on the first try. At the same time, Nat and I have “venting sessions” where we sit down and talk about work and life. If there’s something that’s too complex and I need their patience as I unfold a story, I lead with “Well, this is kind of an Emacs vent, but…” and Nat knows to brace himself.

But what the hell is Emacs, anyway?

I’m not sure I explained it in a way that makes sense. The problem is not explaining what tool Emacs is or what kind of software; that’s pretty easy: It’s a text editor, like NotePad, TextEdit, or that horrible, well-known Microsoft Office one I dare not associate with Emacs in one sentence. Asking what is Emacs sells it short and doesn’t explain why so many people swear by Emacs every day. Perhaps a better question is why. So, as the blog’s title suggests, don’t ask why; I’ll explain anyway.

Some people compare Emacs to an operating system of its own, which makes sense: it comes with so many built-in tools you could fire it up and probably do all of your computing work without ever exiting it. Well, in a command-line computer-geek kind of way.

Some of the things I use Emacs for all the time, besides writing, of course (it’s a text editor, remember?), are to navigate and operate my Mac’s files, read other blogs I subscribe to, check my calendar for events, and manage my projects and todos. I do all of those inside Emacs. But even so, why not just use my Mac’s tools or Windows if I were to use a Windows computer for my productivity?

The answer, which may not make sense to you if you’re not an Emacs user, is that Emacs is quicker and simpler and thus better for me to use. The key thing is that if it’s not better to use for something, I can manipulate and customize it until it is. My Emacs is made for me, and if there’s something I need to change so it fits better, I can do just that. Emacs is completely customizable, which means you get to tinker and manipulate whatever you need until you get those tools to work exactly the way you want them to.

Imagine you get up and make drip coffee. You grind your beans, fill in water, carefully place the filter with the grinds, and turn it on. Now, imagine that turning on the coffee maker doesn’t only start brewing your coffee but also turns on the toaster with two slices of fresh bread and also displays a crossword puzzle automatically on your phone. Not only do these things happen automatically, but also the bread is always toasted the way you like it, the coffee is automatically dispatched from your favorite roaster, and the crossword puzzle is tailored specifically to a level of your liking. On top of that, to continue with the metaphor, you can always make changes (change the coffee type, for example, so you make yourself a cappuccino instead of drip) quickly and easily, and the knowledge and ability to do so is completely yours to do whatever you want with it, for free, forever.

If you could do all of that, would you still go to Starbucks to get your coffee?

Sounds almost like magic, but for a computer, that’s what Emacs is. You could use it to read and write emails, look at maps, browse the web, listen to music, and over other 5000 additional things that exist just in its main library (it’s not even the biggest one). All of those are available for free, code and all. When you’re an Emacs user, all of these functions are available to you with the same ease - and keybinding - that your fingers are already used to.

Perhaps now it’s a bit easier to understand why Emacs is difficult to explain. It’s not just another application. it’s a lifestyle. To me, it has been the ultimate productivity hack - and it keeps getting better.

Emacs configuration is personal, like... stickers?

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 18:46:20 -0400

Over at Irreal, JCS says “I don’t understand what those desiring a minimal confutation are seeking or why they’re seeking it,” speaking of Emacs configuration.

I agree. While I used to be intrigued by minimalism in the past, overall I’m over the idea. For one, while minimalism and productivity come close in our world of constant distractions, but they are not the same thing; for another, I came to appreciate some “tchotchkes” in my life that have no use besides reflecting style or personality. Take this sticker for example, on the shelves on my desk:

It’s an inside joke between me and NK while reminding me of the good-natured silliness we have in this apartment, and of course, it’s the Muppets. I don’t need this sticker; it has no function, but at the same time, it brings a smirk to my face when I get off my chair in my room to say good morning to my partners - so why not?

Emacs configurations is somewhat similar. Sure, it’s technical, and it’s a collection of computer instructions, but anyone who’s been messing with their Emacs configurations for more than a couple of months had comments all over their config file, not to mention (as JCS also explains in his post) the choice to include certain configuration to make Emacs fit their lifestyles. It’s one of the reasons reading through these configuration files is fun: each one is a bit different, with different ideas and perspectives. Emacs is a personal tool, and each person has their own Emacs “stickers” inside their config.

org-mode to Apple Calendar sync via beorg

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 21:20:12 -0400

beorg is a well-known org-mode productivity app among Emacs iPhone users that allows you to view and edit your tasks on the go.

I’ve known about it for a while, but I didn’t have a use case for it for two main reasons. First, I used my Android for my tasks until recently, and with it the excellent Orgzly app (now Orgzly revived). Second, iOS doesn’t work with Syncthing, which is what I’ve been using to sync my files for almost a decade.

Now that I have my now.org and events.org files, I want to view them on my iPhone so I can view my work-related tasks there. This means using iCloud sync. Personal events now also show on my work phone, but at this point, I don’t care if Apple knows I’m going to see my sister this weekend or if I’m meeting up with a friend after work. After all, Apple knows this anyway because I take my iPhone with me anywhere I go; the Android stays at home¹.

I installed beorg again and discovered a nice surprise: beorg also syncs these events to my iPhone’s calendar. Events I create with a capture template in Emacs now find their way into my Apple Calendar through beorg, which sees these events in my events.org because it’s synced from my Mac to my iPhone with iCloud.

I don’t necessarily need to see my overdue tasks on the calendar, but they are there anyway. This can be useful especially when they’re out of the way like this:

I know different packages can do the same thing directly from Emacs, but I gave up on those because they were too complicated and fragile. Another issue I had with these is that I can’t sync my work calendar, which is on MS365, with my Calendar on the Mac. This is a restriction from my employer, which wants us to use Outlook.

Since I now do whatever I can to keep as few Microsoft products on the Mac as possible (especially after I had to wipe it because of corrupted MS Teams configuration, which no one knew what to do about, especially Microsoft’s support), I’m going to keep using the browser version of Outlook for now, which I prefer anyway. ~~so no syncing for now~~.

Actually, as I was writing this post and looking at beorg, I found I can sync my MS365 events with my Calendar on the Mac! My iPhone is connected to my MS365 account with Outlook, unlike my Mac, and shows events on my Apple Calendar there, where beorg can see it. Turns out beorg has a handy extension that saves calendar events into an org file from the iPhone to the same folder I have synced with iCloud. This means that I see my work calendar (and my Google calendar as well, since it also syncs to Calendar on the iPhone) on the Mac in read-only mode. I can refile events from that org file to my events.org and extend on those with notes if I need to (Emacs will copy the entry but will not delete it from the calendar org, which is fine with me).

I like what I see! I can finally have all my events, work or personal, in my events.org! it also sync quickly, so I can change things like the duration or location of events and the updates show almost instantly. Adding things from my MS365 and Google calendars to my Emacs agenda is an excellent find.

¹ The reason for why the iPhone and why I gave up a big chunk of my privacy are stretched over many posts in my blogs; this one and the old one. It’s been a process (and “un” process) that spends across several years.

How my writing outlets balance out

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 11:25:02 -0400

I have several writing outlets, and each one has its own benefits and disadvantages.

There’s this blog, where I slowly become more comfortable writing about more personal things. It’s a good outlet because writing to someone else (you—and thank you, by the way) affects not just what I write but also how I write. Things tend to be clearer and to the point. Usually.

There’s my handwritten journal(s), where I write my feelings and conclusions about certain things as well as notes that I want to keep private. This is a good place to let out thoughts because it allows me the freedom to write whatever I want without explaining myself. At the same time, it limits how much I can write and for how long, as writing by hand is much slower and also starts hurting my hand after a while (I think it’s the pen). It’s also not a good place to find specific information, like names and addresses, which leads me to my new-old addition, the events.org file.

my events file is written in Emacs org-mode. Without getting technical as I usually do when I talk about org-mode, this file contains exactly what the handwritten journal does not: precise locations (with map snippets and links to coordinates), names of people, and exact times. For example, the events file would mention I was out with friends (their names would be captured as tags in the entry) last weekend at a certain pub (map snipper to show it) at a certain date and time. Then, in my handwritten journal, I would expand on our conversation and my opinions if I have more to add.

That last bit above, “if I have more to add,” is different from how I used to capture events in the past completely in Emacs org-mode. I would write down every day in my old journal.org file, making it a habit to try and write every morning or every night, sometimes more in between. I was writing a lot in my journal.org file, leaving little time and energy to write on my blog, let alone a handwritten journal. Too much was invested in one place.

I write on my blog much more often than I write in my written journal. Even if I don’t write a full-length post, I will comment about something I read or a quick photo with an explanation. The more I write these little “nuggets,” the easier and more streamlined writing those become. The “nuggets” workflow is completely mobile with the micro.blog app; most of my photos are taken on the iPhone anyway, and I can edit them with Lightroom or Snapspeed on my phone. I also have Grammarly turned on as a keyboard for proofreading. With these short posts, I skip writing in org-mode anyway.

As you can see, there’s a sort of a cycle going on here. My Events file would describe events along with meta information, while notes about these events would go to my blog and/or my written journal for private comments later when I mentally digest things. There’s another thing I started doing because of the influence of my events file: I started taking more pictures of every place I go to, even if it’s as boring as the sidewalk next to a place.

Photos on the iPhone (or an Android) contain important information I could use later. The time the photo was taken would tell me when the event started. The coordinates, which are captured automatically, will tell me where it was if I don’t remember the name (or if it’s just a spot somewhere without a name) later when I want to find it on a map¹. A photo can also include other information, like a menu of a nice restaurant, or it can be aesthetically pleasing, like the view from a nice spot overlooking a river. Such photos can decorate the entry in the events file, be printed and included in the journal, or be posted here with an explanation. Photos are really great for all of the outlets I mentioned.

¹ - I used to use Swarm for this, and I even have a feature on this blog which posts locations from it automatically, but I stopped. For one, Swarm is a private company and my location data belongs to them before it belongs to me. For another, getting this information out and use it is tricky.

Rethinking & Organizing my life with org-mode (part 4)

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 08:49:02 -0400

Welcome to part four of my rethinking and organizing with org-mode.

In the last part, I rediscovered org-achieve and the option to archive past events. Turns out this works well. Since the archive is an org-mode file, I can add options (like making it present pictures) and give it a user-friendly name. Here’s an example from an event I just blogged about. Looks pretty good, no?

The map is by the OSM package, and the screen capture with annotation is with Snaggit, which I use for work. You see it because I included #+STARTUP: inlineimages at the top of the file. The date breakdown is an automatic org-mode archive option I discussed last time. I use the tags to include people in events and at this point, also to note that I took photos (I don’t want to attach those because this will quickly eat up space - though I could just link somewhere else where I store them… 🤔)

Not bad. I like.

Rethinking and organizing my life with org-mode (part 3?)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:45:20 -0400

I spent some time reading through the manual for part 3 of organizing my life in org-mode. org-mode has an archiving function I haven’t bothered with in the past because dumping old files into a folder was easier to do.

There was this interesting example under org-archive-subtree help text:

“/org/datetree.org::datetree/* Finished Tasks” The “datetree/” string is special, signifying to archive items to the datetree. Items are placed in either the CLOSED date of the item, or the current date if there is no CLOSED date. The heading will be a subentry to the current date. There doesn’t need to be a heading, but there always needs to be a slash after datetree. For example, to store archived items directly in the datetree, use “/org/datetree.org::datetree/”.

Ah ha! So you refile a task and put it away in a different file (this is what archiving does by default in Emacs) and store it in its appropriate month. Not only that, the function will look for when you finished working on a project and automatically store it on that date in a header of your choosing. Good stuff.

For example, let’s say I started to write a technical document at work about pink rabbits (I’m in a good mood, OK? Bare with me, I’ll get grumpy soon enough) and this project includes a couple of subheaders: a meeting we had about the project, a task to backup the existing version of the document, and a couple of more TODOs regarding images and sending it for approval by subject matter experts. So far so good, this starts in Now.org where I keep working on the project and add to my notes.

Let’s continue with the example. Two months later, I’m done with the pink rabbits projects. I go to the parent header in my Now.org file, “update Pink Rabbits document,” and change its keyword from ACTIVE (my keyword for projects) to DONE. Since I have the keyword “ACTIVE” defined with ! in the file’s options (this is defined by the line #+TODO: TODO(t) ACTIVE(a!) MEETING(m!) | DONE(d!) CANCELED(c) at the top of the file - you can see ACTIVE is triggered by a! while its neighbor, TODO, is only t which means a timestamp will not be added), org-mode adds a timestamp for when I marked it DONE.

There are three basic scopes of defining where to put the archived headers. I can define one file in my init file for org-archive-subtree, which will create a global definition and thus a file for everything (not very useful), or I can define the destination for the archive at the top of the org file (so Now.org will have a line: #+ARCHIVE: my/path/is/here), or, I can go into the individual headers and define it there as a property with Archive: my/path/here. This last one is best for me, as I can quickly define headers for, say, article updates, announcements, and misc, each one of these parent headers pointing to a different file, if I want to do that. Nice indeed.

With the datetree option above, these archived tasks will be filed in these files and under the date and time I finished the project. The archive function will include properties in each telling me exactly where these projects came from.

I was about to start using this, but there’s only one problem… I haven’t found out how to restore something back from the archive.

Back to the example. Say I thought we were done with our pink rabbits document so I archived it away. Then, next month, someone says “Hey, JTR, we need to mention the catapults we’re implementing with the pink rabbits. Can you add it?” I say “Sure, no problem!” After all, I have the power of Emacs and it takes me less than a minute to find this project in my archive (consult-grep is amazing for this sort of thing).

So go to the archive file, I find it, and… I want to pull it out of the archive and put it back into my Now.org as one of my active projects… but… how do I do that?

I can be barbaric and go around killing and yanking, but there must be a better way, right? I think? Grrrr… (see, back to my grumpy self).

Rethinking and organizing my life with org-mode (part 2)

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 07:37:58 -0400

The other day, I mentioned how my projects file in org-mode is basically a huge mess that makes it difficult to be on top of things, and then an idea occurred to me during a shower, as all good ideas do: organizing is important when I save and store things, not when I’m working on them.

When I work on something, I deal with a dynamic environment with tasks, reminders, attachments, comments, and a bunch of other things. This is the information-gathering phase. The main point is to collect everything quickly so I have it available later. It’s when I’m done with a project that I need to clean it up and store it in its place so I can find it later.

I was considering (still in the shower) the “now page” phenomenon. What if I change my project.org file to now.org? Technically it will look the same but conceptually it will be different. A place for things I’m actively working on in the present moment.

The real change should take place in the org files I save my projects into. Work projects will go into dedicated files, depending on the kind of task. Personal things will fit into their own files. As a matter of fact, the work-personal separation is not as important as it used to be, as each activity (work or personal) gets a separate file anyway.

For example, if I’m working on a vacation in now.org, I have a project with the location, the hotel, a map of the area, a couple of places to see, and a packing list. When the vacation is over, it will go into an events.org file under a “vacations” header. When I place it there, I will also include a link to the photos I took, tag it with “journal” if I wrote about it in my journal, and add a couple of annotations to the map, depending on where I’ve been.

In the future, when I want to reflect on the vacation, I will know exactly where to look. Keeping these files small is important so they don’t become overwhelming. An indicator for that could be casual reading: Can I just open the file, read through it, and enjoy it? Maybe even make it into a PDF and print it? The answer to these questions should be yes.

The trick is to know when a certain “thing” happens often enough to have its own file. For example, would I need a vacations.org file, or is events.org (which also includes going out to restaurants and movies) good enough?

For this, I think the size of the file itself could be a good indicator. In org-mode, the files contain only text. So if a file contains more than, say, 50KB, it means it has 50,000 characters. This roughly translates to 7,000 - 10,000 words. Since the characters in org-mode are also symbols for syntax for meta information, I think this is a roughly good number for now; I can always adjust it later.

This concept also works when I’m happy with the category the file captures, but as it grows, I can split it by months or years. For example, if events.org is good enough to capture vacations, restaurants, movies, and other social gatherings, and I want to keep it this way, I should have event_2024.org, and then make events_2025.org, etc. It’s possible some things, like certain work activities, will need to be broken down every couple of months while other personal tasks only every year or even only a couple of years.

I started storing some of my completed tasks yesterday, and I slowly chipping away at my big projects.org mess. As I go through it, I will get a better idea of how it’s working and if I feel like I am back in control again. Since I need to wipe my Mac and start fresh (this is a story for a different time), I will have a nice clean start this weekend. That’s the goal, anyway.

Rethinking and reorganizing my life - with org-mode

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:16:24 -0400

I used to be more organized. At least, that’s what I think.

When I was working as a desktop technician, I added all my tasks into a file called “Oh Snap,” which I cleared every week. Every Monday morning, I would go over my Oh Snap file and archive done tasks, remind myself of and write notes of existing tasks, and make sure a weekly backup was created.

In my current role, my tasks mostly grow into projects. Besides some quick things, like creating an announcement or an alert for our website, these projects usually take weeks; some even take months. Going over my Oh Snap file every week stopped making sense.

But when I stopped my weekly routine, I also stopped organizing tasks. Now I have one big file mixed with personal and work tasks, some active and some complete. It’s an intimidating blob of “stuff,” and just looking at it makes me want to run away to a video game instead.

I also write less about what I do in my personal life unless it’s complicated enough with several todos and a packing list or if I have the itch to write, which is when I pull out my journal. This means that a lot of useful information never gets saved. Things like map snippets with locations (easy in Emacs), links to pictures I took with descriptions, and the people I got to know - all of that is not written and gets lost.

This made me realize that the weekly routine around my Oh Snap file was one thing; organizing different tasks and events into categories is also important. I don’t mean just “work” and “personal,” which are too vague and big to work with. Categories should be a rough outline of familiarity, a way to frame and save things for better retrieval later. For example, “vacations” might be a better category than “events” (too general), and both are better than just “personal” (way too general).

A good category is like an apartment building where I know certain past events happen. If I want to see pictures of my niece from last Thanksgiving, a “family” or “holidays” category would make sense; at work, if I want to recall when I created certain announcements for the website, then “website” or “announcements” is a good category for that.

So now I’m trying to figure out a couple of things. First, when should I visit my projects file, which is a dump of everything I do, and move things out into their categories. Second, what are these categories? We shall see what I come up with.

Wed, 22 May 2024 08:07:59 -0400

I’ve updated my Microsoft Edge notes, after working with it for a couple of weeks. If you use Office 365 for work like I do, here’s a tip: Maximize (but don’t go full screen!) when working with Edge. Read more in the full article linked above.

For Emacs org-mode users, two tips in two new notes: linking to other org-mode headers and plain lists to checklists in org-mode.

As always, you can access my welcome note and read all my notes there.

I'm retiring my Android from my org-mode workflow

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:39:09 -0400

I feel a bit weird disconnecting my Android from my work tasks and projects in Syncthing and thus cutting it off from my Emacs workflow, but it’s about time.

I haven’t used my Android for work notes in months - probably a year. I keep having syncing conflicts with Syncthing between the Android and my Raspberry Pie, which still serves as my file server after four years (I love this thing!), and there’s no reason for those anymore. I use my Mac for Emacs 80% of the time nowadays, and I want to include my iPhone in my workflow now so I can use it to record org-mode notes, and the iPhone doesn’t play with Syncthing.

Since my iPhone is my work phone, it makes sense to me that work-related notes are synced to my iCloud, as these are not personal or private, and I want to be able to create org-mode notes on the go again. Apple’s Notes is nice and all, but it’s no org-mode, and it’s not private.

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:44:19 -0400

The issue I had yesterday with Elfeed-org is fixed. As it turns out, the parent headers for the feed have to be tagged with “elfeed” for the feeds to load correctly. It looks like this:

    * Blogs                                                              :elfeed:
    ** Blog 1 feed here
    ** Blog 2 feed here
    ** Blog 3 feed here
    * News                                                               :elfeed:
    ** News site 1 feed here
    ** News site 2 feed here
    ** News site 3 feed here

That’s all that was needed! Thanks again, takeonrules!

And here is what my RSS list looks like in action. It’s nice to sit back with a cup of tea (coffee is a morning thing!) during lunch break and see what’s up:

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 09:21:35 -0400

Scratching my head at an Emacs issue: Elfeed-org doesn’t seem to load my feeds. I’m not sure why, everything looks OK. I have my feeds.org and I have the path defined in rmh-elfeed-org-files and it does show the value it’s supposed to have.

Does anyone have a working config I can look at?

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 07:10:26 -0400

Another little gem I’ve been using for a while: org-toggle-narrow-to-subtree. I added an explanation to my emacs config:

Macro I created to focus on projects (headers in org-mode) that gets everything else out of the way. The idea is simple: when standing on a sub-header (in my case, this is usually level three. For example, I’m standing on “pay electric bill” in: * Personal > ** ACTIVE pay bills > ***TODO pay electric bill), jump to its parent (in this example, “pay bills”) and narrow. When running again, expand it back. This is working by using org-toggle-narrow-to-subtree. Very useful when working in a buffer with several projects.

(fset 'jr-project-focus
   (kmacro-lambda-form [?\C-c ?\C-u ?\C-c ?n] 0 "%d"))

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 21:31:59 -0400

I wanted to fix company-mode for Emacs, and on the way I remembered that was something Emacs already comes with. Yep, and it has a name you’d not guess in 100 years: hippie-expand. Added to my config. See Mickey’s post about it if you don’t believe me.

Emacs org-mode category

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 10:47:48 -0400

I’ve been following 404 media for a while, and after they recently offered a discount, I decided to become a paying subscriber for a year. This is a unique publication with a small, dedicated team of journalists behind it.

With the subscription, they also offered a private RSS feed for full articles. Since I can’t share that private feed with the world, I decided it’s time to migrate my feeds out of my main emacs settings and into its own dedicated org-mode file, using elfeed-org.

As this is yet another Emacs org-mode update, and several people comments on those, I created Emacs org-mode category on my blog with its own dedicated RSS feed: taonaw.com/categorie… This post should be on it as a test.

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 09:01:03 -0400

Updating my Emacs settings file. As this is now in an org file, it’s so easy to write comments there. It helps since comments on the blog get lost over time. If you’re an Emacs nutcase, let me know what you think 😬

Sharing my CSS Tweaks and Emacs Configurations

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:45:48 -0400

And now it’s my to complete a milestone:

Uploading my Emacs config! That’s right. And with it, side by side, the CSS customizations I’ve made to my blog (I’ve made a couple of changes since I last talked about it).

Find them in my public folder on GitLab or just read the new welcome note there.

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 13:55:20 -0400

He did it! Prot created a function that converts denote links back to “regular” org-mode links, using some regex magic.

This means I can now upload org-mode files directly into GitLab, which displays org files natively. Take a look

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:59:55 -0400

I’m happy with how my org-mode notes look like in GitLab:

I need to resolve a few things, like creating another folder for these notes and tying it into my repository, but after I’m done, the hope is for much more streamlined informational notes.

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 10:25:21 -0400

Another Emacs org-mode re-discovered feature as I’m improving my workflow:

Org-agenda is org-mode’s search engine. I include user names as metadata in work-related tasks.

to search tags & properties: C-c a m. For properties though: <name of property>: "<value>"

My

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:10:40 -0400

Another thing I enjoy doing with Emacs org-mode is my habit of watching movies. Emacs reminds me it’s time to watch a good movie in a range of every three days to 10 days. When I watch a movie, I write the title and the year down and reset the clock - which will remind me to watch a movie again in 3 days.

On Emacs, it looks like this:

This is a habit graph. Each rectangle represents a day. The asterisk is when I watched a movie last; the exclamation point represents today. The green bar represents the time range (3 to 10 days), with the last day being in yellow, reminding me it’s the last day to complete the habit before I’m “in the red.”

So, in this case, I have today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow to watch a movie before I’m “in the red” for this habit. Don’t worry! It won’t happen.

When you open this habit up, you can see a list of the movies I watched and when:

Nifty.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:01:44 -0400

I talked about making some changes to my project workflow in Emacs, and here are some changes I’ve implemented:

("p" "Personal Related")
		  ("pt" "Personal Task" entry
		    (file "~/Sync/Personal/Projects.org") "* ACTIVE %^{What?} \n*** TODO Probes:\n %^t--%^t \n\n %U:\n %?" :kill-buffer t)

I talked about making some changes to my project workflow in Emacs, and here are some changes I’ve implemented:

The %t^ org-mode expansion tells Emacs to prompt for a date without a time. It calls a calendar in Emacs with the current day marked, which can be adjusted. In my case, you see two of those: the project’s start and the end (double dashes are how org-mode phrases a time range).

So, let’s say I have a new photography project I want to do throughout February. I call this capture template and enter the first day of February, followed by its last day. This will display the project (say, “photography project”) on my agenda every day throughout the month of February.

In the past, each project (which is an active task with sub-tasks marked by “TODO” items) had several of its subtasks scheduled at specific times. This has been my process for years, though it’s not very useful: I almost never get to work on my TODOs exactly at the time of my choosing.

The idea is that instead of having a list of 20 items that I need to do clutter my agenda with times in the day that don’t make sense, I will only have a couple of highlighted projects I know I’m working on. I can then go into each project from the agenda and see what the next action item I need to do there. This would be a TODO keyword without a scheduled timestamp.

Denote and org-mode instead of my TiddlyWiki?

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 17:21:42 -0400

While I just explained why I’m dropping some of the usages for org-mode, it’s still very powerful for what I do need it: projects and notes.

One of the thoughts that crossed my mind on a walk today was to convert my wiki into a collection of org files. This makes sense because I write my notes in org-mode anyway before I convert them into Markdown and then paste them into TiddlyWiki. At the same time, GitLab can read org files just fine, complete with images.

TiddlyWiki has a lot of functions built into it, but I might do fine without them, especially with Denote introducing dynamic blocks. Dynamic blocks are essentially meta notes, a key feature that allows one to build a wiki from their notes, as it introduces a hierarchy of links.

If I can make this work, the friction in my current workflow (write in org-mode, convert to markdown, edit, paste into TiddlyWiki, push changes to gitlab) will be minimized (write in org-mode, push changes into gitlab, edit after the fact) and will allow me to write more notes, more often. This sounds good.

Less org-mode, more Outlook? Why!?

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 10:29:24 -0400

It was one of our regular Wednesday date nights. Nat and I decided to meet in one of our favorite local spots instead of ordering in. Knowing Nat finishes work at 6:30, I calculated it would take me about 20 minutes to walk over, meeting at around 7 PM. When it was time to go, I showered, put on clothes and… realized Nat was already there. I was half an hour late instead of 10 minutes early as planned.

Nat leaves work at 6:00, not 6:30. He gets home at 6:30. My brain did one of its famous “brain farts” where it convinced me, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Nat had /always finished work at 6:30 for the last five years or so. I was so convinced that I even argued with Nat, saying he must have left work early.

Being the awesome person he is, Nat didn’t take it too hard. After all, living with me means dealing with these issues more often than not. It’s just something that happens now and then. Me, on the other hand? I had enough.

I was never good with dates and times; call it ADHD, call it scatter-brain, call it age, call it whatever. Many people who read this would probably think I should use a calendar. You’re right, most people! I should! The only problem with this is org-mode. Let me explain.

My life is organized in Emacs org-mode. Everything I do, big and small, is written down inside Emacs. It’s my personal database, with search capabilities, dates and hours, TODO lists, and an agenda. I love org-mode, and I’ve said many times it’s the one thing that made me able to organize my life, or I would be a complete mess made of incidents like the one I described above.

Emacs is awesome and all, but there is one thing it doesn’t do. It doesn’t sync with my work calendar.

Now, Before all of you Emacs champs (the rest of you can skip ahead) jump with suggestions about the various packages available to do just that: I tried those a couple of times. They don’t work for multiple reasons, and my workplace locks down some of Microsoft 365 abilities for a good reason. So sit back down, please (I know someone is going to leave a comment anyway. Go ahead you, get it out of your system.)

On with the story.

While contemplating my choices, I realized there’s another big area where I stopped using org-mode: my journal. I started writing analog about two months ago, leaving my digital journal in Emacs behind. I’m enjoying it, and I already have my next blank notebook waiting for me when I’m done with my current one.

Another thing that has changed since I started using org-mode is my work style. COVID introduced the option of working remotely, and the change in my role enhanced that. My daily work computer is a Mac, not a Windows PC, which is less distracting and works with many Linux applications, Emacs included. I no longer have many time-sensitive, urgent, small tasks, as I often manage larger projects with a long-term commitment. However, my work routine in Emacs hasn’t changed in years.

Here’s an example of my current workflow. Whenever there’s a meeting scheduled, I’d go into Emacs and call up a capture function, which will ask me for the title of the meeting and the time it’s scheduled for. It will create a sub-header for my notes, complete with bullet points. Handy, but as I mentioned, I can’t sync between Outlook and Emacs. Every week, I need to look at my work calendar in Outlook, manually add meetings for the upcoming week, and keep them in sync. If a meeting is canceled, I need to remove it in Emacs; if a new one pops up or the time changes, I will have to adjust it. And these days, I have more meetings than ever before.

Then there’s the problem I told you about at the beginning. org-mode’s built-in agenda doesn’t help with my visually-needy brain. The agenda is a wall of text with timestamps and numbers. Since I need to manually enter times and dates, I type the information into org-mode as I remember it. The problem is right there: “as I remember it.” I must have corrected dates and times in Emacs a hundred times. So, I decided to no longer update org-mode with events and meetings.

I’m not fond of Outlook or Google Calendar, but I’ve been forced to use them for years. My partners, friends, and family all have a Google account, which means they see what’s coming up in real-time and can call me out on erroneous times my brain comes up with. The calendars are color-coded and reflect the same visual interface that - very importantly - I also see on my phone in real-time.

While I’m telling you about Outlook and calendars, let me throw something else in: Reminders. I’ve used org-mode for those, and when I’m away from the computer, I use Orgzly on my Android to sync quick notes to my agenda. Since I switched to my iPhone, syncing with Emacs stopped (There’s another technical reason why I can’t sync Emacs notes with my iPhone, which I won’t get into here). When I want to capture a quick idea, the best way is to take out the phone and dictate my thoughts or perhaps record a short voice memo. If it’s a quick thing, like remembering to take the laundry out, all I have to do is ask Siri to remind me. If it’s something more complicated, like brainstorming this post, I would rewrite it as a project, completed with sub-tasks, into org-mode using the short memo as an introduction/outline.

On my Mac, I now have a widget for my Outlook agenda, which integrates my work and personal calendars. Below is a widget for my reminders from my “Oh Snap!” list, which reflects things I want to see in front of me. This list is meant only for quick reminders, while I have a “planning” list of reminders for events further in the future.

I’m still working with org-mode for anything project-related. It keeps me focused and organized at what it does best for me: breaking down big projects into doable tasks and keeping notes organized, private, and stored for the long term. This is an adjustment, and I will probably go back and forth a couple of times, but I’m pretty sure the days of my weekly files are numbered, as I don’t have use for those anymore.

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 10:37:35 -0400

Emacs and OSM (Open Street Maps) are a natural match, so it just makes sense they work very well together out of the box.

Built-in search function, zooming in and out, and creating org-mode links with a single keystroke to locations. Amazing. If you’re an Emacs user, grab it now!

GNU ELPA - osm elpa.gnu.org
Reader: elpa.gnu.org
elpa.gnu.org https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/osm.html

Important factors for journaling

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 07:56:11 -0400

I’ve been keeping a journal on and off since I was 16 or so, but it’s only in 2018 that I started being more structured about it, thanks to Emacs and org-mode. This morning, I thought about some of the reasons this journal is the most effective one for me. Here’s a list, more or less in order of importance:

It is mine (saved locally):

If you have a written journal (a physical notebook), you got this covered. However, if you rely on the cloud, be it iCloud or Dropbox or what have you to be able to write. If you don’t have a file or a physical piece of paper on your hard drive or your shelf, it’s not truly yours - you’re renting out a service. In the case of a personal journal, this is a hard pass for me. In my case, all my files are local and can be read without Emacs since org-mode files are essentially just text.

It’s easy to write down thoughts quickly:

I always have a computer around, and if I don’t, I can use my phone to open the journal file and add to it. On my iPhone, this is a bit more tricky, so I save a quick note and then copy-paste to my journal file if I really have to. Otherwise, it’s a simple matter of 5 keystrokes, and I’m there.

It’s Private:

A journal is private. This is another reason why I won’t have it stored on any cloud, be it iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever have you. I don’t trust anyone else to stay out of my journal because they won’t - be it the temptation to dig for profiling and ads or “think of the kids” policies. I do have a backup for my journal, a local one, and a remote one on the cloud, which gets encrypted on my computer before it’s stored away in Backblaze.

Pictures and drawings:

This is something org-mode is actually not great at, but it works. Pictures are powerful. Memories in a flash, they also store metadata for precise location and time. Perfect for those times when you visit a location and want a quick reference to where it was and what you did. This is one area I do use the phone for and often: I can later extract map coordinates if I want to or write an address. The filename itself tells me the exact time. Pictures that go to my journal are not kept in the cloud anymore - again, I don’t trust Google or Apple with those for long storage. For my journal, it’s good enough to resize them to about 30% of their original size and compress them as a JPG, which really saves room. This is different than preserving good photos in raw forms and processing them later for printing.

Internal links:

That’s probably the latest “essential” requirement I have for my journal, which works well in org-mode thanks to super-links at the moment. On paper, I used to write down page numbers and write in parenthesis something like “see p 128” as a comment. The entry that I point at also gets a link to the one I’m linking from - so they are linked to each other. In org-mode, I use these links to refer to my tasks and projects, which live outside of the journal. That way I can reflect on something I did in my journal and jump directly to the event to see the task itself.

Easy to read:

Probably the second reason (the first reason is that typing is faster than writing) why I keep a journal in a text file on my computer: my handwriting gets worse as I keep writing until I can no longer read it in the future. I’m also prone to spelling mistakes, which makes things harder to decipher and makes me think I have some form of undiagnosed dyslexia. A good spell-checker is a must. Org-mode also breaks down my entries automatically to years, months, weeks, days, and then events in those days, which makes things easier.

My movie watching habit in org-mode

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:44:27 -0400

Not too long ago, I organized my routines on Emacs with new habits. I’m particularly satisfied with my “watch a good movie” habit:

This chart might look confusing, but it’s simple once you get used to it.

Each colored rectangle represents a day. The exclamation mark represents the current day, and an Asterisk represents the last time the habit was completed. The green is the “good range” of the habit in days, which means I have that many days to complete the habit. For example, the head buzz habit above the movie one has today and tomorrow (one more green rectangle) to complete. A day after that is yellow, indicating the last "good day" to do so. After that, the red rectangles indicate days behind on completing the habit.

Once I mark a habit complete, the colored rectangles disappear from my agenda until I'm in range (green) again. The blue rectangle represents the days before this happens. For both the head buzz and movie habit, I have two days (two blue rectangles) after I complete the habit before I should do it again.

So, for the movie-watching habit, today is the first day to watch a movie, after I watched one two days ago. If I don’t have time, I still have about a week ahead of me (in the green).

In addition, I also started to log what movies I watched and when:

As you can see, Emacs keeps a log of when I complete each habit. I then add a note with the movie name (C-c C-z) in the logbook drawer.

This is another fine example of why I love using Emacs org-mode to organize my life.

Installing Emacs from source

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 19:50:06 -0400

Thursday evening I felt smart and decided to clear some space in my boot partition on my Linux Mint computer with apt autopurge. What this does is to clear the old kernels and clear space along with any libraries apt figures we don’t need.

The issue with this is that apt didn’t know I needed certain libraries that came with Emacs. That’s because I didn’t install Emacs with apt, but built it directly from source - to get a later version. The next day, Emacs didn’t launch and complain some essential library was missing.

The solution was to follow my instructions and install Emacs from source, but here I encountered a catch-22: the instructions were in org-mode inside Emacs, which wouldn’t launch.

Instead of taking out my laptop or switching to the Mac, I decided to deal with it sleep deprived, which is something that happens to me often. This, in turn, led to more frustration as I forgot the steps. Eventually, I gave up and went to sleep (which was the smartest thing I had done up to that point).

The next day I looked for help in Emacs IRC. The folks there helped me enough to fix the issue. Now that I have my notes again, I’m putting those here in my blog (as well as on my wiki), so I always have it handy for myself and for you, if you happen to be that sort of geek.

Here are my original instructions based on xahlee’s blog with some additional notes to help.

One last thing regarding Emacs chat on IRC: When going there using the web interface, use the UI to connect to the Emacs channel. Typing “Emacs” directly will open a new Emacs channel with you as the only person in there.

The Process:

Download the gz file from the GNU at savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs.
Untar using your file manager or tar -xvf path/to/file
In the Mint menu, look for Software Sources, under Optional Sources turn on Source code repositories.
Install essential build tools in the terminal: sudo apt-get install build-essential
Get the dependencies using alt: sudo apt-get build-dep emacs

You can now build emacs:

cd to Emacs download dir, run ./configure
run make
now run sudo make install
launch Emacs from terminal

Of TiddlyWiki, Emacs, And Digital Gardens

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 08:32:00 -0400

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been brainstorming the idea of converting this website into a fork of a wiki, particularly, TiddlyWiki. I went full circle from using the tool to builing a static website, back to the original, single-file java script supported version. Here are some of my thoughts.

I brought up digital gardens before, and again when I was re-tagging my posts recently. In short, case in point: instead of having the above links leading readers to find these static discussions which are concealed with dates in the past, the discussion would be dynamic, something I keep adding to as I keep developing the idea.

To continue with this example: on this blog, I would keep discussing digital gardens until it becomes a tag and group all my posts about “digital gardens” together. You’d see a list of posts, organized by date, and you could go in and choose to read pieces based on my progress in time. This is one way to do things and it works quite well if to judge from blogs around the web.

The “digital garden” idea is to have one place, one “post” that is ever-developing, broken down into sub-topics. Certain ideas will get developed, and other abandoned in favor of others. Instead of seeing progress divided into chunks of dates, we see the progress of the idea in chunks of subtopics.

OK. Time to get this off my chest. I don’t like the name “digital garden.”

On the web, folks consider digital gardens anything from a dateless blog to documentations to roam and zettelkasten. I understand the metaphor of being a digital “gardener” as someone who grows ideas and articles, but I prefer to think of it as a form of emphasizing topic organization over date organization. To me, since before I created this blog, this is called a wiki.

The problem with wikis is that they’re technical documents. Or so I thought. Wikis are named after encyclopedias, which are all about facts. But wikis are just a form of content presentation. They can be as personal as any other personal website can be, just as blogs, which are web logs, can be as technical as a changlog or as personal as an online diary.

Before I disappeared into org-mode and Emacs and left all other text editors in the dust, I enjoyed using one such wiki: TiddlyWiki. What sets Tiddlywiki’s apart besides the funny name is that it’s fully self-contained: a single HTML file (at the humble size of about 3 MB when you download it first) which contains everything, text and media, by design. It is a polished tool, a more utilitarian one than eye candy, with all of its settings built into its nested articles, which are called tiddlers. You can go into its style sheets and color pallets, which are tiddlers as well, and change whatever you’d like to make it looks and behave however you’d like.

After moving to write in org-mode however, I didn’t need TiddlyWiki anymore. Emacs offers a much superior writing experience, combined with org-mode, an excellent organizational system. To look into TiddlyWiki again I first had to find a way to work from within org-mode, and I couldn’t find a way to do so. Without much motivation, I gave up quickly and went back to org-mode. It took the spark of going “digital garden” again to explore this a bit more in depth.

One of the first things I learned, on mastodon of course, was that TiddlyWiki now comes on Node.js. Node.js allows you to run JavaScript applications (which TiddlyWiki is based on) outside of the browser using a local server. This also means the individual tiddlers do not have to be nested inside the original HTML file; instead, every tiddler is stored as a file.

OK fine, so I have my tiddlers in tid files, what’s the big deal? Well, now we have individual files with essentially text (in TiddlyWiki markup, called wikitext.) See where this is going?

we can now use Emacs to write and edit tiddlers using wikitext. But it gets better. As it goes with everything you learn, now I was able to ask the right questions. Looking for a way to export from org-mode to wikitext within Emacs, I found ox-tiddly on melpa, which converts org syntax to wikitext. I can now write my TiddlyWiki articles from org-mode. But it gets better even better.

through node.js functions, I also learned that you can convert TiddlyWiki into a static website. A few simple commands which can be made to a single script will convert all those tid files, the tiddlers which are the articles, to HTML files. TiddlyWiki can become a static website, which can be run off GitHub or Gitlab. I can even push changes through Netify, it seems. Essentially the same workflow I’m using for my current static site.

But… as I continued learning about these options, I also realized the one downside of publishing content this way, and it’s a big one: no JavaScript. This means the core TiddlyWiki functions, the same ones that make it so good, won’t work. There isn’t even an option to navigate through the different tiddlers since the navbar is completely built on JavaScript.

There is a way to export JavaScript along with the style sheets and the tiddelrs, but then I’d still need a way to activate it. With all of this it occurred to me that it doesn’t make sense to break down TiddlyWiki if I want to use it for a website; it’s easier and more functional to keep it as is, a single snappy HTML file that contains everything. This is also how other TiddlyWiki websites are built, including the official tiddlywiki.com. So, while there is a slight benefit to working on individual tiddlers locally, I will need to bring everything back together before I build and push the site.

At this point, it’s simpler to just copy-paste the wikitext from the temporary buffer ox-tiddly gives me and paste it into the editor. Another benefit of this method is seeing the content as I paste it live, with TiddlyWiki’s built-in editor preview mode. Images and different styles that are invisible through org-mode are easier to fix this way.

I’m not happy to write outside of Emacs org-mode¹, but I do want to at least give TiddlyWiki a try. I believe the way it will present information, along with its customization, will be the next big step for this site.

Footnotes

¹: I discussed similar issues with writing content out of Emacs not too long ago, and the workarounds I’ve come up with. While I managed to stop using Word for the most part for now (and thankfully so), the big issue is that using Emacs is a one-way street: I can use it to publish content to other platforms (in the case TiddlyWiki), but once there, it’s hard to get whatever edits I make there back in Emacs. I wish I could keep all my work in Emacs, but that’s not realistic.

Org ID, Org Attach & Better Folder Names

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:02:00 -0400

You might have heard of org-mode header IDs. By default, these are Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). In this post, I want to talk about what they are, why I use them (and you should, too), and how to make them into slugs: human-readable IDs that make more sense. This will be a long explanation of what I discovered in org-mode, so buckle up!

What are UUIDs and why should I care?

The org-mode manual doesn’t exactly point at header IDs unless you know where to look. Because of this, a casual user of org-mode might overlook these powerful organizational tools.

In org-mode, we can link to a file and a head directly: <path to file>/parent header/header, but this is risky because we refile (move) headers between files; old projects get archived, meeting notes get moved under other relevant projects, etc. This means that any links using a path like the one above will break¹.

For this reason, we have header IDs: Org-IDs. They require that we include org-id in our init file (as part of org-mode’s modules), and then we can generate them for any header by calling org-id-get-create:² “create an ID for the current entry and return it. If the entry already has an ID, just return it.”

By default, org-id-get-create creates a string of random numbers and letters: a UUID. Now, every time we want to reference the header, we link to the UUID instead of the header’s path, like so: [[id:our UUID here][description here]].

This is great, but these UUIDs are a string of random characters that make no sense to us. A header with an ID like 05576976-a33c-11ec-9da6-020017000b7b doesn’t tell us anything. We will return to this problem in a bit, because first I want to discuss another great (and perhaps overlooked) org-mode feature that makes this even more problematic.

Referencing to files with Org-Attach

Org-mode comes with a built-in attachment mechanism called org-attach. You can summon it with C-c C-a when inside org-mode under a header. Org-attach was one of the features I always knew existed but never used.

We already have a system to navigate and organize our files ingrained deep into our mind, be it Finder, Windows Explorer, or whatever GUI file manager we have in front of us. For us dedicated Emacs users, there’s of course the excellent Dired.

What’s more though, org-attach is using some seemingly weird system to store our files deep in folders that don’t make sense to us, and the only way to find them later is to use org-attach again to go to these attachments (by calling org-attach with C-c a, then choosing f or F, depending on the case). At least, that’s what I thought.

Assuming you haven’t tweaked your org IDs, org-attach will nest an attachment under three folders. First, the default data folder, which is where all the attachments are stored. Second, under it, a folder with the first two characters of the header’s UUID. Then, third, a folder with the rest of that UUID as its name.

This is a bit confusing, so let’s break it down a bit. Again, the following workflow assumes you don’t have any settings affecting org-attach. Launch Emacs with -q if you have any doubts:

Go visit an org file, and navigate to one of its headers.
Summon org-attach with C-c C-a. This will bring up a menu. For now, just use the first option, a.
Next, org-attach will ask you which file you want to attach. Navigate to one and select it. Don’t worry, this will create a copy. The original will stay where it is.
With the point on the header you just worked with, which should now have an :ATTACH: tag, summon org-attach again, but this time call option F, which will open the directory the file is in with Dired.

What you’re going to see is that you’re inside your org file’s folder, inside a data folder, and then inside a weird two-letter folder, and then inside a long string representing the rest of the UUID. Something like this: /home/user/orgfiles/data/ab/f4b2cf-4b38-45ec-9333-346b42861d24.

I’d argue that this way of creating attachments would cause newcomers to Emacs to prefer other methods for storing their files. It looks odd, and it doesn’t make sense when you need to find something later. That’s too bad because you’re missing out on org-mode’s excellent ability to organize your projects with their files attached right to them, of course, but this habit also comes after years of using org-mode (at least that’s how it was in my case).

If only you could make these folders make sense. Well, this is Eamcs. Of course you can.

From Org-IDs to Timestamp Slugs

The idea is simple: change how these IDs are created in org-mode by modifying org-id-method. By default, its value is a UUID. But we can change it to ts³: (setq org-id-method 'ts). That’s it. The next time we create an ID using org-id-get-create, it will produce something like 20220315T083403.413614. Still a bit confusing to read, but much better than UUIDs! The format is: year, month, date, followed by T for time, and then the current time down to the fraction of a second. Why do we need it broken down to these tiny time fractions? To guarantee we get different org-ids if we create several of those sequentially.

This will set up our unique IDs as timestamps⁴, but we still need to configure org-attach to use them. Because org-mode is set up to use UUIDs by default, org-attach is set to create directories that are meant to work with UUIDs. The directory structure is determined by org-attach-id-to-path-function-list. Specifically, it points to two functions: org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format and org-attach-id-ts-folder-format. You can go into org-attach.el and see that they break down the folder structure in a pretty straightforward way: the UUID function (which is the one used by default) takes the first two characters of the UUID and makes a parent folder out of those (as seen above), while the ts function takes the first six. The first six characters make sense because they include the year and the month.

By default, if we use the above example of 20220315T083403.413614 as a timestamp, we will get the following directory structure: /home/user/orgfiles/data/20/220315T083403.413614: the first two digits are for first two digit of the year: 2022. This is not very useful, as you will need to use org-mode until the year 2100 for a new sub-folder to be created!

This is what happened to me, and it required some head-scratching and diving into org-attach to figure out. I tried to mess around with the functions in org-attach directly, but that didn’t go well. Eventually someone on IRC pointed me to what I missed: what needs to be changed is org-attach-id-to-path-function-list. It is as simple as changing the order of the functions on this list, so org-attach will know to use the ts function first.

Together with org-id-method, which we defined above, we can write the whole thing like so:

    (setq org-id-method 'ts)
    (setq org-attach-id-to-path-function-list
    '(org-attach-id-ts-folder-format
    org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format))

Now when you use org-attach, it will use the ts function and create the following directory (to use the example above): /home/user/orgfiles/data/202203/15T083403.413614. This makes much more sense. You could also build your own function that would look like org-attach-id-ts-folder-format, perhaps for using the first 4 characters to create a parent directory for the year only. You will just need to make sure your custom function shows up first in org-attach-id-to-path-function-list.

A few Extra Things

I mentioned I used an excellent package called org-super-links. In a nutshell, this package automates creating org-IDs, linking them to an org-header, and creating a backlink from that header to the one linking from it. You should read Karl’s post about it and how he uses it to get a better idea than what I’m letting on here if you’re interested. As a matter of fact, if you want to get some more background, read the previous post mentioned above and you’ll see I’ve been trying to change org-IDs into timestamp slugs for a while. So much so, in fact, that I wrote my own function to do that for me until I discovered org has a system built-in already. As it goes with Emacs though, there’s no wrong answer. The previous attempt took me deeper into Elisp, which was a fun learning experience in itself.

With org-super-links, the process above is quicker because I don’t need to deal with org-id-get-create. I just search for the header I want to link to, and everything’s created automatically: an ID for the header I’m on, an ID for the header I’m linking to, a link linking to that ID at my marker, and a backlink at the header I am linking to pointing back to the header I’m on. You’d probably need to read that last one again. The bottom line is that if you’re serious about organizing your org headers, you should probably check out this package.

Another post that’s been floating around since 2017 by Matthew Lee Hinman approaches org-mode IDs from a different angle: exporting to HTML. In the post, Hinman explains that if you use IDs in your org file, you will also benefit when you export it to an HTML file: the header links you will use will link where you need them to go, and that’s even after you move headers around.

I’m actually using HTML more and more at work when I want to export my org-mode files into KB articles that go into wikis. This is especially helpful when you include a table of contents: the headers in the TOC will not break if you use IDs. This is maybe a bit more of a niche use, but having a TOC in a how-to article makes a lot of sense, and org-mode creates one for you by default when you export to HTML.

Footnotes

¹ As a matter of fact, I think breaking links to headers and losing information is one of the reasons for org-roam’s popularity. Of course, the new versions come up with a lot more than just linking notes across a database, but at its core, I think this is why people started adopting it.

² In newer versions of Emacs, using org-id-get-create (C-c l) can automatically generate an org-id for a header, if one doesn’t exist, provided that org-id-link-to-org-use-id is set to t. This can be done in the init file in Emacs.

³ Emacs documentation specifies a third method, org: “Org’s own internal method, using an encoding of the current time to microsecond accuracy, and optionally the current domain of the computer. See the variable ‘org-id-include-domain’.” This generates what seems to be a random string of text that is also not human-friendly. I’m not sure about the computer’s domain part, but this might be interesting for folks who have several computers on a domain using Emacs.

⁴ Giving headers unique IDs as timestamps is also useful because it leaves “clues” to help locate lost information later. For example, when you create a project with this unique ID, and later on you forget what it was, you can use the date to clue you in. It gives you another layer of search on your agenda (“202203” for example) to show all the projects created in March, provided you create an ID for each project, which you totally should. Because this is a simple text string, you can also use this outside of Emacs with other scripts to automate tasks that will look for this ID. It opens a world of options now that you have a range of unique IDs that you understand in your head, AKA, slugs. Also, it just looks better.

Capturing doctor visits & Sickdays in org-mode

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 13:03:00 -0400

At work, we need to fill out a timesheet every month. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, this is usually a spreadsheet with one column for each month and cells for each day. You fill in the code (V for vacation, S for a sick day, etc.) for the spots you took off from work. There might be a few more variations of these, but this is the general idea.

To me, timesheets are a pain in the rear. I need to check your calendar (or agenda in my case) to see when I took the off days, then I need to mark them down on the spreadsheet, and then I need to export them to a PDF to sign the thing and send it to my supervisor. I’m horrible at keeping track of these things because they don’t fit my workflow: a vacation or a doctor visit gets marked down on the agenda as an event with a location, unique to its settings. This makes it difficult to go back and catch those when it’s time to do the above routine.

I had been considering using tags for a while, but I usually only use them for people on the agenda when a task or event involves them. I could have used a category, but it seems silly to have a whole category for one thing just because it’s hard to find on the agenda. Then an idea hit me when I was watching the Emacs Conference, when I noticed a few of the presenters using tables: a table!

Of course! Not only can I mark down the exact day for a sick day I took, but I can also fill in if it was half a day or a full day, which is another thing I need to mark on the sheet. It took some time to figure out how to use org-capture for a line in a table, but the results were well worth it. Here, take a look:

Looks great, doesn’t it? Not only do I have a nice, organized place to mark down these days, but I can also link to the event itself on the agenda (right now it says journal, I should change that). I can even go into the table and add separators for months and make it clearer. If only Emacs could also fill the Excel sheet I need to fill and sign for me…

Here’s the code that makes this work:

    ("js" "Sickdays" table-line (file+olp "~/Archive/routines.org" "Personal" "Sickdays") "| %u | %^{(H)alf/(F)ull} | %? |")

table-line is the magic word that tells org-mode to populate the next available line in the table, so it doesn’t matter what’s before it. I can add and remove things as I please. And then the lines just work as is, using org-mode’s powerful table format.

Submenus in org-mode capture

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 08:21:00 -0400

In my last post, I discussed how I (finally) found out that I can use entire org files as capture templates. This is a basic feature that works out of the box, but the org-mode manual doesn’t give it enough exposure in my opinion. Turns out it wasn’t just me either.

As I expanded my checklists and learned more “trivial” org-capture features, I discovered additional useful things but ran out of time to write about them. It’s now time to get back to the basics of org-capture again for some helpful tips.

When you build your org-mode templates, it’s possible to create sub-menus for better organization. Another way to explain it is to think of “categories” in your capture.

Says the manual:

Keys

The keys that selects the template, as a string, characters only, for example ‘“a”’, for a template to be selected with a single key, or ‘“bt”’ for selection with two keys. When using several keys, keys using the same prefix key must be sequential in the list and preceded by a 2-element entry explaining the prefix key, for example.

The bold part was another part that I had to read several times to understand. I knew there’s something different because two letters are used, but my capture template failed to work the first couple of times. I figured it out, and here it is:

     (setq org-capture-templates
      (quote (
              ("s" "Manual Laptop Setups")
              ("sd" "Staff Dell Laptops" entry 
              (file+headline "/mnt/veracrypt1/Archive/OhSnap!.org" "Staff Dells") 
              (file "/mnt/veracrypt1/Work/setup-dells.org"))
              ("sa" "Staff Apple Laptops" entry 
              (file+headline "/mnt/veracrypt1/Archive/OhSnap!.org" "Staff MacBooks") 
              (file "/mnt/veracrypt1/Work/setup-macs.org"))
              ("sm" "SLS-Mac" entry
              (file+headline "/mnt/veracrypt1/Archive/OhSnap!.org" "SLS-Mac")
              (file "/mnt/veracrypt1/Work/setup-SLS-Mac.org"))
              ("sw" "SLS-Windows" entry
              (file+headline "/mnt/veracrypt1/Archive/OhSnap!.org" "SLS-Windows")
              (file "/mnt/veracrypt1/Work/setup-SLS-Mac.org"))
;; more code below - the above is incomplete

Let’s take it piece by piece from the top. Keep in mind, this is not the entire capture section, just the relevant part. If you copy-paste it into your Emacs init, it will fail with an error.

First, as soon as I start the capture templates, it seems as if I am starting to create another one inside the first one. That’s what the manual means. In my opinion, it stumbles on its own words. I feel like an example would go a long way. What I did was basically create a sub-menu for “Manual Laptop Setups.”

The result is that when I call org-capture, I get the following:

    Select a capture template
    ===========================
    
    [s]... Manual Laptop Setups...
    [i] INC (my incident template)
    [e] Event (my event and journal template)

I have more templates going down, but I want you to look at the very first one. That [s] with the three dots after it indicates pressing s will take me to a sub-menu of the capture template, which looks like this:

    Select a capture template
    ===========================
    
    s [d] Staff Dell Laptops
    s [a] Staff Apple Laptops
    s [m] SLS-Mac
    s [w] SLS-Windows

You can see from how the menu looks that all of these items start with an s, but this time without the brackets. The brackets indicate what you can press now after you’ve already pressed s to get into the sub-menu you’re currently in. That is, d for Dell checklist, a for Apple checklist, and so on.

Each one of these sub-templates is a checklist based on an org file, as I explained in the previous post. The templates are all org files (like setup-SLS-Mac.org, for example, the third template), which are nothing but checklists like I pointed out in the previous post.

This way, I can have an entire “category” of capture templates, with S for setup, without having a long list with letters that won’t seem related.

Org-mode in files

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 21:01:00 -0400

Note: Before I dive into the how, I want to tell you a story about why I needed checklists, and how, for a long time, I wasn’t aware that org-mode capture templates can be called from individual files, complete with their headers, tags, checklists… everything. You might find this useful if you’re starting out with Emacs, or if you are a veteran Emacs user who wants to understand some of the hurdles non-programmer Emacs “newbs” might go through.

If you want to jump ahead to the good stuff, it’s under the “How this works” header below.

First, I want to answer why use a whole file as an org-mode capture template. To understand that, I need to explain some of the work I do as a help desk person in a large organization.

Among other things, my work includes prepping desktop and laptop computers. For the most part, this is done from an image, and all software not included is installed remotely via our SMA. However, there are still many cases where the automation fails or does not apply and hands-on deployment is needed. Some scenarios include:

BYOD devices, which need to be evaluated and prepared for our environment.
MacBooks, which we can’t automate yet.
Replacements of existing computers, which should also come with a snort checklist, reminding me to change the inventory, and re-add the hostname to AD down the line, because it is taken (by the existing computer) when I start the process.

These scenarios are complex but similar in one area: they beg me to use checklists. We’re a big company, and often I find that a good checklist is half the job.

Communication with clients, managers, purchasing staff, as well as documenting everything, is also a part of the checklist. The difference between a job that was done with a checklist and one that was done without is so obvious that my checklists have been adopted throughout the team, and I was asked several times to guide others (especially newcomers) because of my “methods”. I find this humorous because if you know me, you’d know I’ve always been far from organized. It’s all org-mode, to which I’m very thankful (note from future me, about six years later: I owe this organization my promotions at work. Little did I know back then that these checklists would go so far!).

As you can imagine, these checklists get quite long and complex, containing parent items and their children.

In the past, I’ve had a long checklist “template” in a header in the setups.org file, which I used to copy-paste into new projects. The idea of using a file as a template for org-mode capture occurred to me in the past, but because I’ve never seen an example in the wild and didn’t find a clear reference to it in the manual, I dismissed it as wishful thinking.

When I asked about using org files as templates on Reddit I didn’t get answers. I believe that’s because I didn’t understand exactly what to ask, since I didn’t know what I was looking for. After all, if I had a more concrete idea, I’d probably read this in the Org manual for what it was:

template

The template for creating the capture item. If you leave this empty, an appropriate default template will be used. Otherwise this is a string with escape codes, which will be replaced depending on time and context of the capture call. The string with escapes may be loaded from a template file, using the special syntax ‘(file “template filename”)’. See below for more details.

This little paragraph of text can be found about half a page down in the manual. I read the capture part of the manual probably 20 times or more at this point, and I still feel I wouldn’t know I can use a file as a template just from reading it. But why?

There’s no clear statement that says you can load a capture from a file; rather, it says “the string with escapes may be loaded from a file…”. To me, this meant I could include my template’s syntax in a separate file instead of specifying it in my init file. I had the following template:

      ("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/Documents/Work/Setups.org")
    "**** %<%H:%M> about %a \n%?" :tree-type week)

** And I thought this bit of lisp could go into a file. OK, but what’s the point of that?

So, if for some reason I wouldn’t want the above code in my init file, I could copy-paste it into a dedicated file. This didn’t seem useful for me, after all, I wanted all my code in one place where I can break it down with explanations in org-mode, so I didn’t bother with it.

Further, the manual says “see below for more details,” and there aren’t any. There are only details about what is referred to as “string with escapes.” Nothing really tells me I can have my whole template, a huge checklist with headers and tags, in another file.

So I just struggled for a while, trying to figure out how to fit my a checklist in a single string, as shown above, such as [ ] checklist item one /n [ ] checklist item two /n and so forth, which of course didn’t work well (how would I tell org-capture to indent items so create children items under a parent item this way?)

At some point, I saw an example of someone using a checklist that was inside a different file. stumbled me: for the first time, I realized what I should look for. I managed to find a couple of questions related to org-mode in emacs.stackexchange.com that were not directly related to my issue, but had the following lines in the code (I cut out the paths as they do not matter here)

("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "...")
(file "..."))

And then, I found a presentation by Jonathan E. Magen. Of particular interest was slide 6. Right there, in front of me, the title was “Template stored in file,” and below it, a very simple example of org-capture lips that tells org-mode to read the template’s content from a file. It was as it is in the manual, but this time, the slide was very specific, telling me “this is how you tell org mode to go to a file and grab the capture template from there.” Someone finally pointed a finger at it for me. So, this was true. Org-mode can read templates from other org files.

I wrote the code as I understood it from the examples I found and added (file "~/Documents/Personal/journal-tmpl.org") to the code above instead of that “string with escapes”, and got an error: org-capture: Capture template ‘j’: Template is not a valid Org entry or tree.

I saw this error in the past. I got this far before. Now, through the eyes of someone who knows this should work, this error looked different. Org-mode, I knew, (or Emacs for that matter) should open any file if I tell it to, even if an MP4 or a JPEG file. I would see gibberish on my screen, yes, but it would open. That made me realize that if I see this error, it means the capture template should work, and what I wrote does indeed tell it to open the template from a file, but something in the template file was specifically wrong.

Suddenly, this error became an encouragement that I am headed in the right direction. The error was now telling me, “Hey, I want to do this for you, but your file is messed up, sorry.” Knowing this, I turned back to the community, this time asking the right question: What is wrong with my org file?

How this works

As it turns out, my regular org file started with certain options like #+TITLE: and #+TODO: with several headers already nested inside of it: org-mode capture was looking for the capture syntax, and instead found options it didn’t know what to do with. If I simplified the file and removed all the additional options, it worked.

Here’s a complete example of one of my org-mode capture template files (for example, mac-checklist.org). Notice how the very first thing is the header itself. It must be the first thing in org-capture syntax. Then the second line specifies what the template does, just like it did in my init. Finally, the checklist itself:

    * Setup Proccess [0%] 
    %^{Ticket}p %^{ID}p %^{Computer}p
    - [ ] Rename (SLS-ID-MAC)
    - [ ] Check OS Updates
    - [ ] Encryption
    - [ ] A/V
      - [ ] Install
      - [ ] Manage (overwrite XML file)
    - [ ] SMA
    - [ ] Restart 
    - [ ] WiFi
    - [ ] VPN 
    - [ ] Another App
      - [ ] Install
      - [ ] Test
      - [ ] Test w/ VPN
    - [ ] Asset Registration

The header has a percentage that changes as I fill in the checklist items. This allows me to see how close I am to being done straight from the agenda view. The second line tells org-capture to prompt me for properties for the ticket number, ID number of the person, and the computer name. Then I have a blank list ahead of me, which I can fill up according to whatever is already done.

This particular list is summoned by a very similar line to the one I have above regarding my journal. I just have a different file specified (say mac-checklist.org instead of journal-tmpl.org).

I am now working with four checklists, which I’m tweaking to perfection, summoned directly from org-capture.

Because I was encouraged to work with different checklists from one menu (org-capture), it meant I needed to look for a way to have “submenus” inside org-capture. In other words, if I want to capture a checklist, I should choose something like c in org-mode capture, and it would then take me to another menu asking me which of the four checklists I have to use.

Once again, I learned this is possible, and I went down a different rabit whole understanding org-mode capture menus to the point of re-inventing my workflow. This is too much to include in one post, so I hope to specify on that soon (note from the future: I did). For now, the big lesson I learned is this:

If you think something is possible, it probably is. One way or another, it is. And for those of you who used org-mode for years, especially from a programming background, I hope this post serves to show that some of us struggle not with the code, but with a lack of good, clear examples. We need a story, a scenario, a reason to explore. (another note from the future, after using Emacs for almost 8 years: this is probably our job - the bloggers. To tell a story and not just explain how we do something, but why.)

Orgzly: An Interview

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 12:52:00 -0400

I’ve talked about Orgzly several times on this blog, but I haven’t dedicated a full post to it until now. Instead of describing my workflow again or just praising Orgzly’s usefulness in a repeated manner, I thought it would be interesting to reach out to its creator and ask a couple of questions instead. To my delight, he was happy to reply! I’m happy to present my first interview on this blog.

First, for those of you who are not familiar with Orgzly, a quick intro. Those of you who are, just skip the next paragraph.

Org-mode, as awesome as it is, has one glaring problem that keeps many users from using it all day: its inability to be mobile. Org-mode is built into Emacs, which in turn is built into Linux (or, with some alterations, into macOS). This means you can’t take Org-mode with you on the go. For Android, Org-mode’s official tool was MobileOrg, which is no longer active. While workarounds exist, it’s probably safe to say the only Android tool worth your time out there is Orgzly. As I mentioned several times before, it was actually Orgzly that got me into Org-mode and then into Emacs. I use Orgzly every day, all day. It is easily the main reason why Org-mode is even an option for me at work: it is what allows me to access my agenda and todos with all their details on my running-around routine.

With this out of the way, let’s turn to the creator of Orgzly: Neven.

Neven prefers not to talk too much about himself but agreed to tell us he’s a software engineer working for a company in the US. His experience comes mostly from working with Java. Below, my questions in italic, his answers in the texts under.

Orgzly seems to answer a very specific niche: Android Org-mode users on the go. Are these the people you’re trying to reach?

The project was born from the need to have org files on my Android phone. MobileOrg was the only app available I could find, but I had a hard time setting it up and getting used to it. Initially, I started writing a web app, in Rails. But too many little things bothered me, it felt hackish and clunky. So eventually, I started playing with Android. I never wrote anything for it before, but since I use it, it seemed like the best alternative. Orgzly literally grew from the “hello, world” app, while I was learning to program for Android. So my first goal was to have an easy-to-use Android app for org files, yet powerful enough to be able to do the majority of work in it.

Having Org-mode users as the app’s early adopters was very useful, as they know what they want and how they want it. It was also a motivator for me. But I had non-Org-mode users in mind right from the start. Even with huge competition in the field of task apps, I thought it would be useful for the quality of Orgzly to make it tempting for those users as well and see what suggestions they’d have on improving it. It’s easy to get stuck writing for the very specific type of mostly tech-savvy users and end up with a hard-to-use app. Orgzly was made to support more formats to store the notebooks in - not just org files - from day one.

As an Org-mode user, how does Orgzly help you with your personal workflow?

When I got a job years ago, I needed a way to track all the projects and the little tasks I was working on. I never had a real need for that before, so I started using a simple spreadsheet (I used OpenOffice, which was popular at the time). Occasionally I gave random software or productivity apps a go, looking to improve my system. Eventually I tried Org-mode (after about a year or so) and never looked back. At the time I was a Vim user, but because Org-mode became such an important part of my workflow, I eventually switched to Emacs. It was way more convenient for me, as I became a heavy Org-mode user.

Nowadays I use Org-mode for pretty much everything: Orgzly-related work, day job-related projects, and personal tasks. Anything from new Orgzly repository type support to buying fruits at the store, really.

Can we expand on that? We Org-mode folk love hearing about other people’s methods and hacks…

I don’t do anything too crazy. I used to store the majority of my tasks in three big org files (Orgzly.org, work.org, and personal.org) with different states, tags and properties. Search speed became an issue for me in Org-mode, mainly when filtering by planning times and properties, so now I have two files per area: one for active tasks and one for some day/maybe (a la GTD) stuff. I also have a separate Inbox.org file (again taken from GTD, the method I’m trying to follow as much as I can in Org-mode). This seems to be working particularly well with a mobile app such as Orgzly, since you don’t want to spend too much time thinking where and how to store some idea or a task when you’re on the go.

What do you hope Org-mode users get out of Orgzly? What about the non-Org users you mentioned?

For Org-mode users, my goal is that they feel as comfortable and efficient in Orgzly as much as they do in Org-mode. This is obviously a huge goal and the app has still a long way to go for that to happen, but I think it’s a useful goal to have since it helps to improve the quality of the app.

As for non-Org-mode users, they should be able to use the app easily, without the underlying format of notebooks or any Org-mode-specific features getting in their way. They shouldn’t need to know what Org-mode even is, but if they learn about it through Orgzly, great.

What makes Orgzly different than the other task and productivity apps out there then?

Considering the number of apps out there, it’s pretty hard to stand out. Having notebooks in plain text and being able to sync them anywhere would be the main advantage I guess. Syncing is currently done through Orgzly’s Directory repository, and Dropbox is still the only way to do that directly.

Do you get any help developing the app? How much work and time do you put into it? Orgzly doesn’t have any ads or any other form of contribution, is that something you are looking into?

I try to work on Orgzly as much as I can, but I don’t do it nearly as much as I’d like to. It’s not always easy to find the time between my day job and personal projects. There are periods when I have a lot of free time to work on Orgzly, and there are times when I can barely get on top of my emails. Contribution on GitHub is great, especially small and tested pull requests which I can just merge immediately. There have been some larger projects done too. For example, there is a Git repository support currently in progress which I’m barely involved in, which is great. As for Orgzly monetization, my plan is to implement in-app purchases for the version in Google Play. (note: Orgzly is available in Google Play store and in the free F-Droid store - J.R.) I never considered adding ads (I do not like seeing them in apps). I considered accepting donations, but I prefer trying to have a long-term steady income instead, eventually.

Neven, thank you so much for agreeing to do this FAQ. Please keep up the excellent work!!

Thank you! -Neven

A Couple of Concluding Remarks

I have a few additional thoughts to share after hearing from Neven:

First, It was intriguing to hear Neven’s opinion about non-tech and non-Org users. In a way, he looks up to them as inspiration: the more they can use the app, the better the app is. This makes me think about the Org-mode and Emacs manual. It is very detailed, very informative, yet in the beginning it served me as a last resort only. That’s because it feels like Emacs was written from the “inside” by people who understand programming and Linux. Because of that I often couldn’t find what I was looking for and ended up Googling basic questions. I didn’t know what to ask. Today, when I have a better understanding of what I need, I can use the manual more often. But Orgzly was not created this way. I started using Orgzly before I started using Emacs, and one of the reasons for that was because it made sense from the start. The manual was intuitive, made sense, and small. I think Neven is on to something very important here.

Second, I find that a couple of hacks really help me work around Orgzly’s limitations. It is, after all, just an “Org-mode light”. It might be useful to highlight some of these here again:

Neven said that in a mobile app, you don’t want to think much about what information you capture and where to put it. This is something I very much agree with. I have Orgzly’s agenda widget on my screen for my tasks for the day, which is a quick tap away from projects I’m working on at any given moment (since I go back to my office to refile and organize between tasks). The widget has a plus sign at the corner which quickly launches a new note in my default “inbox” org file. When I create a note, I often don’t type. Instead, I tap the microphone on my Android’s keyboard and dictate what I need. Even if the translation isn’t 100%, it’s close enough that I know what I wanted to say when I’m in front of a computer. This is so quick it’s often better than using org-capture. When the note saves, it is automatically scheduled as a todo item on my agenda for the same day (an option in Orgzly) so that it’s in front of my face on the agenda and I can refile and schedule it as needed and don’t forget about it.

The second thing is Syncthing. Neven mentioned Dropbox, which works fine, but for the more privacy and space-aware folks out there, Syncthing is a godsend. I wrote about it in length before so I won’t get into my system here. If Orgzly is what allows me to work with Org-mode everywhere, Syncthing is the glue that makes it possible. An update on my phone from the field will show up in a second on my VM at work and my Linux box at home, and vice versa.

Evolvement Of Video Journal & Org

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:07:00 -0400

Over time, my journal videos (I call these j-vids, or jvids for short) got smaller. This is because I got used to use org-mode to record my thoughts. I discussed these a couple of times before.

My tasks rarely contain sub-tasks anymore. This is odd because sub-tasking was one of the reasons that initially got me into org-mode. Over time, I found that I rather leave notes where I left off and what needs to be done instead of using Keywords (TODO) for tasks in org-mode¹.

The notes I take are usually brief (one paragraph with 3 to 5 lines) and are time-stamped with the most recent note at the top. This lets me know where I stopped a task and why with a quick glance. I also use such notes to indicate general mundane errands, like buying groceries. In such cases, I can also include a checklist.

The org-mode journal is a different story. This is where I let myself “spill the beans”. I’ve been on a long break from using a journal because typing it felt slow and I wanted a quicker way to record my thoughts - so I started recording myself in jvids.

But recording myself was inconvenient. I had to take a break from my workflow, record a video, name it, compress it, and save it. It required that I’ll find a quiet corner - nearly impossible to do during my day - to record for a few minutes. So out of necessity, I started to include more notes. Eventually, I felt they become too long and too personal. I needed a separation. Going back to my journal felt natural.

Now I find that typing is just slow enough to make me process what I’m thinking. I can edit what I’m trying to say, which means I can rethink of a better way to describe it. To stop myself from going on and on, I journal on specific events, not an entire day. My capture template copies the link of the event from the agenda and makes it the title, then takes me to the under it to start typing about it.

Yesterday, I noticed something interesting: with time, my rambling on videos was reduced from going on an on for an hour plus or so (and multiple videos) to shorter segments. Here’s a visual:

I reached the conclusion that my written journal is just better at keeping track of my experiences. Since I re-created the way I save my achieve files now, it also means the links from the journal to the events is never broken: I just have to make sure to refile an event from my “oh snap” thought-dump folder into the current week’s org file, and I’m good².

I still record a short “weekly summary” on weekends, and now I find that I’m actually looking forward to it. These are now 10-20 minutes long videos in which I briefly go through my agenda and logged events and explain what happened while my memories of this week are still fresh. I then give the week a “theme,” like “agenda and conclusion” if I can.

This work sas a way for me to remember what happened far in the future if I want to reflect on my experiences but not look for something specific, or if I’m not sure what it is. It’s also a good way to reflect on the major events of the week after I had a weekend to slow down and process.

¹ Note from 2024-09-26: today I live by subtasks and such Keywords in org-mode; they are a critical part of my organization

² Note from 2024-09-26: today, I’m back to using a hand-written journal for summaries of personal reflections and emotions, while the more technical notes about the task are included there. Instructions for the future are kept in a separate notes folder, where I use Prot’s Denote to write them in a step-by-step format with visual aids as needed in org-mode.

Libre and clothes

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 15:06:00 -0400

When I write, I live in Emacs (with the awesome Solorized theme) inside org-mode.

With time, I found that org-mode has already made me a more efficient writer and note-taker. I write notes in every meeting now, whether it’s my"turn" or not. I write notes as I work on every solution and every problem I’m facing. I write first thing in the morning, usually about my org-related thoughts as I wake up, over a cup of Sumatra coffee (a little almond milk, one pack of sugar). Quite honestly, Org makes me feel good because it’s transparent. It’s an extension of my thoughts, continuing on one long line, uninterrupted before I stop to think a second and reflect on what I was thinking (X-q).

There’s no pretending in Org. No fancy text, fonts, or even images. Style is only applied to function. It’s a delicate balance which, with the Solirized theme, works extremely well (by the way, the story of the man who created Solorized is quite interesting and worth reading).

Alright, but every now and then, you need to present stuff, and this means you need to “dress up” so other people can talk to you and relate. The “Normals,” so to speak, do not understand my org-mode dedication and often give me concerned looks when I type away a single long line into a blank screen. The purity is empty, and the lack of buttons and distracting elements feels threatening without GUI guidance. Fine then, I can do fancy schmancy.

Most org-mode folk I’ve read and listened to talk about LaTex. In my case, that meant a full installation, which is huge—over 2GB. It’s not worth it for occasional usage, especially since I work in a Microsoft environment, and most people I’ll share with will need .docx or .ppt format anyway. So, for me, .odt seems like a better answer.

Two things are needed on my Emacs (version 25.2.1) for that:

Download and install Libre Office. It comes built-in with many personal desktop-geared Ubuntu distros, but in my version (Mint), I chose to opt out at the start. OK, no biggie, the full Libre Office suite is only 100MB, and I can do that. I see myself editing the occasional Word file or producing a PDF.
Add the following to .emacs to turn on .odt option in the export dispatcher:

`(eval-after-load "org" '(require 'ox-odt nil t))`

Now I can create the .dot file, which I can open in Libre Writer. Ooof. Hello word GUI, with weird paper-screen restrictions look. And the white, the white! It burns us! Overall, things look excellent, but if I want to change fonts, move around images, eye-candy, etc, now I can do it without leaving Linux. Then again, if I really need to produce a document, I might as well save my .odt in Writer to a .docx and remote into my work computer, where Microsoft reigns supreme. Options. We like having them, yes?

Another option I was considering is to use Typora, a pretty markdown writer. It comes with Pandoc and can handle Word and PDF files. Typora does not feel “Linux-free” to me and seems heavily inspired by different “minimalist” Mac world processing apps if that’s your thing. It probably won’t show up in your distros and requires installation from a PPA. I used Typora for a while for markdown, but we’ve parted ways.

I’m curious how this will stand out when I present my notes (since I’ve become the unofficial note-taker at work for the reasons mentioned above).

Emacs org-mode on The Art Of Not Asking Why

Correcting photo orientation for org-mode in Linux

Installing Harper on Kubuntu: The Right Way. Maybe.

Using Denote for Email: A manual workflow

Footnotes

Journelly and OSM for Emacs are good together

It's official: I prefer Inkwell over Elfeed

Footnotes

Display images with Org-attach and org-insert-link quickly and effectively

Harp is org-mode medical app for Android

I think I found what crashed my Emacs on macOS

Emacs for macOS and Darwin versions

Org files to beatiful docx files with Pandoc

Creating the default style sheet

Modifying the styles

Using Pandoc to export from org-mode to a docx file

Images and Tables

A few tricks I picked up

Bonus: use dwim-shell-command for quick export

Footnotes

Why I use Denote?

Reflection on my Emacs experience

org-mode capture: menu inside a menu

I like the DU command in Dired

Handling project in Emacs - the 2025 version

Footnotes

Emacs and mental challanges

HTML export to work with TiddlyWiki

A quick rundown about how I write instructions in org-mode

Thinking about organizing my RSS stuff

Footnotes

Denote with a different root directory on Linux only

Launching a script with a keyboard shortcut on a Mac?

Harper: quick, light and private grammer check for Emacs

Footnotes

Adjusting my org-mode workflow

Footnotes

compressing mp4 files while keeping better quality with dwim in Emacs

Journelly is having me try a new perspective

I wish I could use Journelly's new location features, but...

Emacs' windows navigations and some Emacs zen

Footnotes

Emacs window management tweaking

A month with Journelly

Footnotes

First week with Journelly

Footnotes

Correction about Journelly

Journelly and org-mode

Emacs 30.1 so far

back in the groove

More Emacs would be nice, but...

More problems with my projects and meetings in org-mode

How I handled projects in Emacs org-mode in 2024

Footnotes

Filtering org-agenda to *exclude* a category

Irreal on my writing habits

Digital Notes vs. Analog notebook

Back to digital journaling once more...

Emacs-plus PATH in macOS Sequoia

What is or why Emacs?

Emacs configuration is personal, like... stickers?

org-mode to Apple Calendar sync via beorg

How my writing outlets balance out

Rethinking & Organizing my life with org-mode (part 4)

Rethinking and organizing my life with org-mode (part 3?)

Rethinking and organizing my life with org-mode (part 2)

Rethinking and reorganizing my life - with org-mode

I'm retiring my Android from my org-mode workflow

Emacs org-mode category

Sharing my CSS Tweaks and Emacs Configurations

My

Denote and org-mode instead of my TiddlyWiki?

Less org-mode, more Outlook? Why!?

Important factors for journaling

My movie watching habit in org-mode

Installing Emacs from source

The Process:

Of TiddlyWiki, Emacs, And Digital Gardens

Footnotes

Filtering org-agenda to exclude a category