Getting Started With Org Mode

I'm Harry Schwartz I'm a developer here at thoughtbot I like Emacs a lot and I use it for all kinds of stuff in particular there's a mode called org-mode which is basically taken over my life I use it for writing documents I use it for organizing calendar events sometimes I organize to do's with it I write all kinds of articles and occasionally blog posts in it and it's just a it's just a big ol mess it's I mean it's the best thing ever but it's it's taken over my life is what I mean and today I'm going to walk us through introduction to organoid with examples and stuff what a concept first of all who here uses or mode in some capacity okay like like half of y'all great this is going to be fun you're going to ask me hard questions that won't be able to answer I like to take this kind of loosely so if you have two questions just yell them out I'll be fine sure versions that I'm using yeah I am on Emacs twenty four five twenty four point five and I'm using or version eight relief I'm using the current one I'm not sure specifically what it is but it's eight something I don't think I'll be using anything that will be very version specific if you're using anything that's come out in the last couple years this should all work so organoid began its life is an outliner you can start items in the outline with a star just need to be a little bigger everyone yeah underneath a header like this you can add an arbitrary blocks of text text text text you can expand or contract these as you like which is kind of convenient underneath the header you can add more items at the end of this you can hit a med enter to create a new thing of the same type yeah you can also reorder them we've meta up and down which is kind of convenient or ode is basically a markup language if you've ever used something like a markdown it's a lot like that but it's much much better in a thousand ways that will go into it's also similar to restructure text and all those other similar things so let's talk about markup there are a bunch of different kinds of things that you can do mark applies you can make things bold with stars you can make the metallic with slashes you can make them verbatim with equal signs and you'll note that the style changes a little bit as we go along here if you really want to you can also strike through things I think this looks atrocious but that's okay as with any mark up language you can have a bulleted list items and you can also insert links so here's an example let's suppose that I want to link to the lovely org-mode org page or gutter I can hit ctrl C ctrl L to insert a link and if this is a little bit tiny here but it's saying a link and it's prompting me for what I'd like to say so I'm just pasting org-mode there and that says description and I'll say work mode and if it's added this link here for me I can follow that with ctrl c ctrl o and it'll pop that open in my browser so that's cool internally it's representing this if I hit backspace here as pair of bracketed items here so I've got one pair of brackets with the address in it another pair with the text and then a final pair of wrapping around them so it's just plain text all of this work mode stuff all just plain text if you wanted to you could open this up in vim and edit it why but you could another nice thing about this linking stuff is that you can link to arbitrary other things not just websites but files or emails or to-do items this is pretty cool I have this bound to control CL and it says here at the bottom stored display preferences this is a an item for my configuration and if I switch back to that buffer I can say control C control L and then hit up and it'll say file and then it says that file and then : : display preferences so I'll just call that supply preferences which is the default when I hit control C control oh here to follow that it pops open that buffer this is super convenient sometimes when I'm editing code and I know that there are a bunch of things in a source file that I need to change I'll create a little to-do list for myself with links to those things it's pretty handy for that it's also convenient because you can link to things like to-do lists as I said or email addresses if you email messages rather if you read your email and Emacs which I know at least one person here does which is not me one day one day maybe maybe next month we'll see um laughter so that's why pretty cool another thing you can do that some other markdown formats really suck at is tables so markdown in particular is awful at tables but work is pretty good so if I put a pipe here and let's say I want to enter some data I hit enter pipe - tab it fills out that which is very fancy right now I can't add between these cells so let's add some data here one two buckle my shoe three four shut the door that's good so we got this data here we just tap it and it's created that's cool um a really cool thing that we can do though is that we can rearrange things with meta meta up-down left-right so let's suppose that I decide what we really wanted was three four shut the door to be the top I just drag them around I can also reorder columns in the same way which is very fancy I'm not going to go into this here because it is bonkers crazy complicated but um org remote tables are so much more powerful than I'm detailing here they're spreadsheets you can put arbitrary Lisp you can have cells be various other things I did is nuts it's crazy there's formatting it's super cool but check that out for yourself because that's a whole other talk that wants to get that talk by the way let me know one of the advantages of writing any kind of markup is that you can export to other formats that is done with the ctrl c ctrl e command so let's suppose that I want to export this ctrl c ctrl e pops up this buffer which lists all the different things that I can export it to let me in begin that bit I can't and bigan that how embarrassing but I can export to iCalendar format because you can attach data to things as I'll discuss a little bit later you can export to HTML tool attached to markdown to plain text I have a thing for exporting to Twitter bootstrap formatted websites which is very pretty so oh and and more things you can they're arbitrary exporters that people write it's actually very easy to write an exporter so let's let's suppose that I want to export this to HTML I hit H to go into this one and then o as HTML file and open and there we go lo and behold here's that here's the table book even looks pretty so that's pretty cool any questions so far oh pretty fine ones uh I'll show that in my config real quick but it's it's a one-liner there's a package that someone wrote that you can add it's a something like pretty bullets formatted bullets I'll look at it those are just asterisks but way I think I said that but I forget if I made that clear the number of asterisks is like mmm in HTML this would be in each one with two asterisks since in H 2 and so on so we got that one thing that you'll notice here in this exported business here is that I have this file called example.org and it just titled an example that's not a good title for a document I can add all kinds of metadata to an org document now the format for that is a hash plus and then there are a bunch of different things title in this case oh my that contrast is terrible it's a all up case title and then colon and then I'm going to call this a gentle introduction to org-mode I if only I could type now when I save this and when I try and export it again there we go change that title so that's good I can do things like if there's a there's an options option very helpfully called and that has a whole bunch of key value pairs that let you modify how the document board so let's suppose I don't like this table of contents thing I don't really I can set TOC to nil save it export it again and it's gone there are a ton of other options that you can set like maybe we don't want numbers maybe we you know want to show a little footer here at the bottom maybe don't we don't want to show the footer maybe we want to all guys stuff tons of things we can do but that's so that's a simple one so one of the nice things about writing a promote is that you can include source source code very easily so let's talk about source code before you go on catcher can you export a subset or Foe like a region Oh probably yes yep cool I haven't done that um whatever protein Rolly sure control C control how export scope that's very cool for buffer or for some tree so you can toggle it between the buffer or the current subtree that you're in so if I do subtree and hit enter of course I don't want to hit that I want to hit H oh and there we go it shows just that stuff there that I've sent nifty yeah thank you I did not know that haha that's the trick you give a talk and any learned stuff oh I didn't mention this but you can export to many other formats - I only showed HTML but let's show PDF through latech latech is an intermediate format that's I mean it's a perfectly good format for writing things but you can use that to generate very pretty PDFs so pretty and that's from the same source file which is super convenient a lot of people like to so a lot of people that write papers in you know academic subjects use org-mode for that because it gives you most of the benefits of low tech without having to write all in latech because latech kind of sucks to write it sometimes it's super powerful but I would rather write in this personally when again as for source code you can insert blocks of the form begin source and then the kind of code you want let's say Ruby here and then end the source there are also a bunch of shortcuts that are built into orc mode if you hit less than s tab you'll also get a little source block that gets expanded that's very helpful no one wants to write out all that we can edit a source block in the mode of the language that it's in with control C quote so let's write a really little factorial function here that's let's pretend we're functional programmers and that's the thing that we do all the time is right factorial functions if it's flat one otherwise return what n times factor n minus one seem right to you that seems right to me so there we go that's now in there I can save that and when I export at HTML it will now claim that I'm not in a project which it did not did before how frustrating I think that's a projectile thing and I think that's because it wants me to be in I get project so I'm just going to do that quick to humor in there we go very good and then we have this source code block which it's not super clear here but is syntax highlighted because I set that up with a package called minted or 40 so that's that I'd mentioned that you can use it as a substitute for low tech and you totally can so you get characters like alpha yeah that source code block there yeah is there a way to make or there is indeed we'll be talking about that a little bit later yeah so if we named it well so actually a very easy thing we could do is hit control C control C and it will evaluate it in place these are the results let's suppose that we wanted to call factor 5 I haven't tried this so I'm really going out on a limb here there we go 120 so it evaluated it with the appropriate interpreter and pasted the results in there how bonkers is that the answer is so bonkers that's great I know that's great uh so we've got these characters alright to go back to the low-tech stuff I'm gonna cover a little bit more of that later I'm going to talk about babble but we've got these characters here and let's put those in there lamb boom alpha to beta so good that's kind of down there but let me I'm big in it a little bit OOP yeah so you can just include orb character aah-choo latech commands in an orbit acumen if you want to be a little bit more fancy you can include math blocks like suppose we want to say something like o of n log and that's the thing we would say a lot right let's expand that out there we go that's correctly formatted so good if we want to we can even say more complicated things like we can use the align star environment that latekka provides and oh yeah I'm Cupido boo-boo don't mind me I remember latech I really do I swear let's change those to those and do that again there we go and say something like 3 times 2 times 1 is equal to what I have here I have an example here I swear but we can line some stuff here and say that's 6 plus 1 and then give it a new line and then align those and that's equal to 7 and hey presto when we create that it will put it in there correctly this is just HTML but it's using a JavaScript package called mathjax and that's just included when or compiles things by default you can disable that if you really want to but this is pretty cool and unsurprisingly when you export to PDF it also turns out correctly the latech here after all so that's where science I think you can also use this for exporting to different things like Beamer if you like making presentations and you like make em all pretty and latech e you can use Beamer to do that which is great I think I have it in here it's a l'attaque yeah as pdf-file Beamer and open ser this will look a little weird but yeah yeah isn't that great look at that even a little attack man oh man solid stuff Beamer so there's a package called ox - Beamer and Oh X is org export so there are a lot of package the packages that are prefixed with ox and that's the one for Beamer if you require that and you may have to do one or two other little things that would if there are such things they'd be in my config which is online at github comm / hrs and it'll all be it's pretty well commented which nicely ties us in to the next topic of literate programming so we showed that you can evaluate source blocks in your latech file in your or file rather another cool thing you can do is evaluate all of the source blocks in a pork file so I have a really really simple in it al let me just open that up here Emacs Annette GL it is a one liner I run this demand or a babble load file and that loads up a word document which is my configuration org and what it does is it looks through it it finds all of the source blocks that are marked as Emacs Lisp and evaluates them all sequentially so if we look at the actual config file it's uh I mean it's just an org document I use this package called sensible defaults to set some stuff I set my personal information in here um let's see oh here's my org stuff I have some display preferences oh here's appears what it is it's or bullets mode I set that to true I believe you need to install a package called or bullets Mendelson you can also do things like hiding bleeding stars that's where if you have like three asterisks it'll only show the third one and it'll be indented correctly anyway so what happens is there's this notion called uh there's this a system called Babel which is associated with a work which will go through your document find all the source code and an appropriate language and generate a new piece of source code from that I knew a new document from that so that's what I'm doing any questions about that part it's kind of magical I have a lot of opinions about literate programming um I think it's mostly a pretty bad idea but for things like this that don't change very much and are kind of intended to be didactic like that people should learn from I think it's a pretty useful way to do things um also when I convert it over my config into work mode I found all kinds of crazy duplication and weird inconsistencies and stuff so this was a very nice exercise Bansi that's my entire configuration file which to be fair is almost 1200 lines long um so you know we can expand this out and then it gets pretty pretty crazy but uh you know a lot of its pros too which is kind of hey I even linked pros anyway good stuff uh I can export this to for example there we go table of contents yeah that's kind of cool got a lot of code I do all kinds crazy stuff like I said that's all in line and as a benefit uh it's hosted on github and github now parses documents correctly and displays them about as well as they display markdown they don't do clever things like evaluating code blocks and putting them into stuff but something I should have mentioned when I was talking about evaluating code blocks is that if you have a code block and it has some results you can type those results out two out of the screen out to the compiled document but you can also pipe them in as input to another code block so sometimes people will write code that generates some information and then pipe that into like a new plot block to generate a graph of it hello which is magical I think that's super cool that's literate programming or that's some stuff that I do with what our programming anyway same one have any other questions related to that cool so let's talk about to do stuff a lot of people use orgas extremists what I'm sorry I'm sorry the navigation hotkeys for source blocks I know that they exist what what did you have in mind so there's one that is moved to previous and next source block that brings your cursor to the biggest source directive I was wondering if there it brings you either to the edge source directive or the results directive sure so is there something that will is there a kick man that will bring you from the source code to the results directive or the the end directive um I'm going to say yes because is there a key command to do something yeah someone someone did that I don't know it what what I do in practice I use evil mode and I use the curly brackets to skip up and down by paragraph and in practice and select maybe one extra keystroke so I haven't bothered with that optimization yet but I bet there's something out there that would do it for you hey I'm I'm very often in fact that just seems like the kind of thing that has to exist anything else about box or code or anything five or thumb I can fit Carly it's just one big old file yep separate files but they what any long I could separate them into separate files I don't know that that would be of any advantage like right now I can expand and collapse them and it's pretty pretty easy to search through stuff it's only one file I got a grip pretty lazy about that kind of thing it's nice I for I mean normally I am very into yes let's split everything in separate files and you know one responsibility in every place and all that good stuff but for this I go totally the opposite way have I tried using littered program room for anything up with the name ax Lisp I have I played around with piping the results of code into other blocks like generating graphs and stuff or more or less for fun I've done that with Ruby successfully I haven't really tried it with much else I actually think literate programming is almost always a terrible idea if you have if you have some kind of project I think good software engineering practices are about making sure that that project can change in the future easily and I think having a lot of comments that needed need to be changed when the code is changed also will make it harder to change and will eventually become deceptive because people will not always change those comments and on and on and on I have a well prepared half hour rant on this topic that you can have me on leash later on but yeah I haven't you illiterate programming for much other than this kind of thing and I think it's nice for papers to like if I was writing a paper something in particular if I was interested in reproducible research I think that would be a great way to do it anything that's like more documentation like documentation focused like intended for teaching I think literate programming is a really great model for things that are not like that I think it's not a great model I think if you're Donald Knuth and you're writing the art of computer programming excellent choice if you're not but config files I think are a great case for it they don't change very much they need to be well documented people learn from them so that seems like a great case deliver programming to me yeah yeah I actually did a complete 180 on this I used to not do that at all I had a ton of tiny little Ellis functions and I actively did not comment them because I wanted the function names to be the documentation and I have since realized that that is done it's just not a good fit for this particular use case so about those two dues I was going to talk about them so what what originally lured me into port mode is not all this neat publishing stuff that you can do but rather to do management I read getting things done which is a fancy fancy book about keeping all of your life in a to-do list and I thought yeah I want to do that but I also like plain text and I like this clunky old editor from the 70s how can I combine all of my passions together it turns out org is great for this so if you have some bulleted item and you prefix it with the word to do you'll note that that turned a weird color to do once you explain to do lists if I can't shift a meta enter it will create another one there underneath it um one of the things that you can do is that you can cycle through States so if I have this guy here I can hit ctrl C ctrl T and it will be marked as done how fancy I can hit ctrl C ctrl T again and it will remove the to do and if I hit control C control T again it will cycle through to do if I want to I can change some metadata about that file to say that I want to insert extra states in that cycle or have multiple cycles even personally I use to do waiting and done waiting for things where I'm like blocked and waiting for someone else so that's all pretty cool note that when I did that it added this little timestamp on the end I was just pretty fancy a cool thing about org timestamps by the way is that you can modify them with shift left and right so I can be like oh let's go to another day it's kind of cool I can attach deadlines to things so let's suppose I really need to explain to-do lists today I can hit ctrl C ctrl D and that brings up this this magical calendar in my text editor which is bonkers which will let me choose a day so let's suppose I should have done that while back this is now assigned to do a deadline and I can toggle that with shift left and right and shift up and down to go by month if I want to that's pretty cool I think huh haha can I ever so oh boy oh boy if I hit control-c a that summons the agenda which is not a thing that I can embed a mitt however this has a list of letters and what they do among those things I can see the agenda for the current week or day a list of all of my to-do entries in multiple files if I can figure that there's a little bit of a lisp you need to write to set that all up but it's it's quite straightforward I can search based on certain tags there are tags there are all kinds of crazy things I can do in here so yeah I can totally sort by my stuff what what I actually do though is I hit control C control X control D to archive something when I'm done with it and what that does is it takes that that item marks it is done sets that closed time stamp on it removes it from the file it's currently in and appends it to the end of an archive.org file that I have somewhere else so I have a list of all the things that I've done in the past like five years which is kind of neat and when I did them all that good stuff so in practice I don't need to sort by done because they're they're already sorted by done yeah yeah to do with hormone or events but as someone who probably leaves yet that would walk oh yeah use you saw his unsuspecting saw his treatise on to-do lists maybe six months ago Jeff AdWords treatise on to-do lists what was the thesis along it it was that you should throw them all way throw them all away all your package is convention to whatever and just go with doing three things a day hmm because you could remember three things it's easy you don't need to write it down you don't need to put it in Emacs you don't need to keep track of it you know if you got them done cool and I saw that and I've done so much of this that there's so much history going back to probably at least 1992 and I saw that it was instant believer sure but I was curious you would come across it what your reaction would have been now that you mentioned I have heard it for the recording that was Jeff at woods post on trashing her to-do list and just writing out a list of the three most important things you need to do every day my response to that would be how does Jeff Atwood ever remember when he needs to go to the dentist I never would if I did not have something that told me to its calendar entry for me but I have a lot more than three things that I need to do and they're mostly things that I don't want to remember so I I really need some kind of backlog I feel that if you keep everything in a to-do list and you're very diligent about keeping it up to date and pulling things off of it appending things to it find a new thing that needs to be done comes in that works pretty well if you kind of do it halfway and have a to-do list of things that you don't regularly update but just sort of looms over you and is existing at the same time as an unwritten list of things in your mind that you're worrying about you will have a very bad time and it will not work I think in my experience that's what's happened so I think no to-do list is an option I think it's hard to keep track of stuff because there are more than three things I need to do and some of those I will need to do tomorrow so Wow so created you don't necessarily want to remember what you've done yeah that too the way I do it here is I now have a record of everything I've ever done um that's kind of convenient every now then I need to be like when did I pay that bill or you know most last time I went to the dentist or whatever and I can find out very easily uh that's that's kind of useful yeah so if you're into that it's a pretty good way to do things I think if you have a different system feel free to not use this I will occasionally set up one of these little guys for work you know like I know I have like four or five all the things I need to do today I'll just set up a little separate list and that just helps me keep it in mind for sometimes I'll just do it on paper man but yeah yeah so I have this synchronized in a folder I have a directory of multiple org documents and I have them syncing to server than I control through a tool called own cloud and remind me to come back to own cloud at the end because that's one of those things I could talk about for a while but own cloud is a beautiful piece of software but everybody like a lot it's it's like a Dropbox replacement but it's also a Google replacement in a lot of ways which is pretty sweet oh let's see ah there's the agenda I just showed you that that's that's the most of what I want to show you there are a bunch of other things that you can do with org there are things called org capture templates where you hit a key binding and it creates a template for an org item and then you fill it out submit it and it gets appended to a file somewhere or creates a new file or whatever you wanted that's pretty handy like if I can't Mehta n for me it creates this little to-do item here and if I type some stuff and then hit ctrl c ctrl C it just appended it to my org index file nice we had a whole talk about org capture at Emacs NYC which you can go look up so you know it's a big deal it's pretty cool there's a lot to it you'll notice that I can attach timestamps to things some people manage their calendars in org-mode you can do that there was that agenda stuff that I showed you but there's way more that's pretty cool uh reproduce some people uh yeah I have not um I did not let me let me show you the agenda oh god I hope I don't have anything embarrassing going on in my life no good not much that's gonna be on the internet I'm writing similar dammit um I'm right now some code examples I'm performance review I need to fill in I let's see I need to read a book about Haskell that's important for me to do haha deadlines one of those things so this is this is my next my next week in summary I don't I don't use the date stuff very much I use more conventional calendar for most my calendaring but some folks are very into doing that you know Kath my capture piles and piles and piles and piles of tattoos but I don't always assign a deadline to them I'm searching for two dudes that don't have a deadline tricky yeah so like everything to have a gate which it should be done yeah so the the problem was how do you get things done without a deadline sort of man story of my life so I only assign deadlines to things that have like a really firm time that they need to be done like you know I really should read that Haskell book but there's no deadline on that and I could say that I need to finish that chapter by Saturday I do not need to finish that by Saturday and since that is a made-up deadline that will make me not respect any of the deadlines and eventually stuffs gonna slip through the cracks so I tend just to not do that because or is hierarchical I mean I can I can like nest to dues in other - dues so I can say oh you know I've got all these things because I can nest to dues I can create projects and they'll have like a series of tasks that I can cross off so I think every now and then going through your to-do list and like grooming it a little bit just to organize things in a sane way is pretty useful so I tend to do that a lot I mean not a lot but you know every few days I'll be like what the hell is going on in here clean it up a little bit and organize a little more sane lean that tends to get stuff done having not to go all GTD again here with beginning things done philosophy but for every project having a next step tasks is pretty useful so this is very conducive to that yeah am i talking about contactless I'm not because I have not find a great i found a great solution for context contact lists in orc I know that there is a package called org contacts and I am certain that there are people that use it I have not found it to be super great what I've been doing for contacts is using a UNIX program called a book which is like address book and it's a curses tool it integrates with mutt very well I use mutt for my email I think if you want to manage two contacts in Emacs one of the great old tools is still BB DB which is the Big Brother database that monitors all of your emails and adds them to an address book super good way to manage contacts a lot of people do that I mean you know a lot of people relative the number of people that use Emacs for their mail which is some and it's a good tool for that one of the experiences that I had accounts management what was that accounting stuff that one doesn't to generate invoices I would just say accounting trying yes and I'm getting really heavy into programmatic generation of data tables reports and encountered situations where the or mode features that I needed or it didn't exist but for the next version and so I got into entrap my my own making but you know I use the deal sources for Emacs and then try to use D to have sources for both mode and the two conflicting Andy just got to the point that pull hair out kind of important result from but I do remember that was chosen looked into google friend of mine where a gmail calendar you know various other things sure Enochs thank you is that a question so the question damages did you get sucked into the temptation to use the new features which come up at a incredibly fast rate from the or below developers anymore motors develop the fact that what motors developed aside from Emacs it just would have been so much easier with in Emacs itself I that bow because you are hmm yeah so yeah so the question broadly was because org and Emacs are developed separately and because they're bleeding edge features in orgs that may not be compatible with one version of Emacs and you sort of end up with this like race to have both of them bleeding edge and sometimes things break but there are cool things in the new versions of org do I do I get trapped like that and I I don't really I don't really use them any really cool features nor I mean I think the things that I do are amazingly cool features like you know I write I'm writing a booking org-mode and it's fantastic but there are definitely cool things that you can do like time tracking stuff for example and there are all kinds of really fancy new features and I I really don't use them sorry this is this is an introduction speaking of cool things you can do with Emacs now up with the word mode there is a package called org to blog or g2 i have an editor for me it is called org to blog and that can be used to take an org document and publish it to a wordpress site so if you have a wordpress blog you can write all of your posts in org-mode and publish them from the comfort of your editor without ever having to visit the site which is pretty darn fancy if you don't even want that much overhead which i wouldn't you can use a tool called word publish where you can define the layout of a website in or mode or any kind of project actually and have like a directory of files and call org publish from within Emacs and it will take that whole directory structure process all of it through work mode and spit out a website which is Bonners but number people do that and it's you cool one day I hope to join them see there's some other cool things you can export to I mentioned Beamer and I didn't show you a Twitter bootstrap to show you Twitter bootstrap i'ma show you Twitter bootstrap it's kind of calling me for my config through this so uh Twitter bootstrap or as they prefer to call now bootstrap is a it's kind like framework for designing static sites and they can allow pretty there what every startup looks like essentially at this point pretty much everyone uses Twitter bootstrap to make the page so there's a exporter called Oh X dash T WBS I should just write that down Oh X dash t WB Tess I have that installed so when I hit control C control e I can hit W o and it will process it and lo and behold here's this thing how cool is that it's got this this wacky JavaScript a menu thing here on the side it's it's all lava kerning you know it's great this is really pretty so that's pretty cool so you can do that and just skip around it stuff you got all my customizations so that's a fancy one another exporter is a X - G FM for github flavored markdown different that that's kind of handy if you write a lot of that honestly I just write it directly in it I thought or exporting to that but some people might let's see I mentioned that you can do all kinds of scary stuff with spreadsheets in York tables bonkers what you can do in there you should check it out it's crazy the last cool thing that I was thinking of is there's a tool called org drill which lets you define like a hierarchy of information and it'll structure them as flashcards with in Emacs so you can have a question and then an answer and I'll show you the question and then show you the answer but you can have just this whole hierarchy of flashcards and then run or gadreel and it'll drew you one yeah right necessary yes no oh that's pretty fancy uh there's ton of cool stuff you can do in work mode that's all I have air good laughs one of my papers but y'all have any questions I'd be happy to answer yeah I'm cloud oh yeah do we have any organ or questions first I have been playing with that recently I'm kind of so my blog is currently on Jekyll oh and I like it it's good don't get me wrong chuckle quality thing but you know I'd rather be writing workloads and markdown and I hosted on github pages and it needs to be just so with just this particular markdown and I'd rather not do that so I'm think about switching over I've been playing with that the main problem for me has been trying to figure out how to make my old Jekyll links work because Jekyll structures things in directories like you know 2014 slash 15/7 715 rather it starts March wither and then the name of the thing and you know I need to figure out how to make that structure work I'm figured that out yet but I'd like to so that's that's somewhere down the road it seems really cool from what I've played with it so far it seems great if you don't have a structure that you need to match already oh boy Ali what I ever be doing that right now it's nice what else y'all got yeah have you used mobile at all on I played with orc mobile a couple years ago and I did not like it it was very clunky I think it hadn't been maintained in a while I have heard that there are some people trying to revitalize our mobile but I have not tried it out I hope they have mobile work stuff abused it is warm saline Brooksley organization pretty good orcs Leon Android cool that sounds neat it's like someone just went their own way with Lord aside it's actually I mean you can't do any heavy lifting in it but if you just want to do get the general sink and be able to add we'll get stuff Z Z online who are gzl why are obviously that nature see there's this thing called obviously and apparently it's good hello my trick it up there's program called drafts for iOS DRA FTS and it lets you write it's kind of hard to explain but you write a little snippet of text in a window and then you can pass it through some template and that will process it in some way like maybe add a timestamp or for example prefix it with star space to do space and then append it to a file somewhere or create a new file or send it off to some other kind of external service that's a super powerful tool that not a lot of people are talking about they all should because it's amazing drefs is neat if you're on iOS any other or LED trust me so one cloud is amazing if you have server it can either be a physical server or it can be like a digital ocean instance or whatever else you'd like it's a it's a lamp type program so this PHP application runs on my sequel and what it does is it provides you with some kind of syncing utility kind like you get through Dropbox which has desktop clients for all the places you'd expect and also mobile clients I use it for calendars so I I'm not on Google so I needed something to share calendars with a lady over there that was not Google so I've been using kind of the server running next to my desk running own cloud which does that networks very well you can manage contacts with it and sync those up the calendar stuff runs CalDAV the contact stuff runs whatever the equivalent for contacts is I forget card add that's it yeah that's cool there are a bunch of other things you can do with it there are ton of other packages that I've not taken advantage of if you're running it on a physical server one of the advantages is that in terms of file sync your only limit is the size of your hard drive so I have like a terabyte of sync which would cost me a lot of money from Dropbox which is great haha so that's kind of cool I'm big fan of all no I've played with academics and I've thought about doing that and I haven't get a neck seam super cool I've also thought about setting up a like like something to let like a notification system on my server where when those things change it'll make it commit there's a really cool tool called a entr I think it's called it's not a lot of people know about it's like a generalized inotify tool this is kind of a tangent but I think entr is amazing so I just need to just need to tell you that exist but I'll know that I would use it for that but it's super cool but if for example like you want to regenerate ctags or something all the time auntie are be a great tool for that this whole thing is you have the server and you've got huge amount of data out there you you manage backups and things that it'll you do all the mazes yeah one sits next to my desk it's not that hard it doesn't change much I you know every six months I log in and update all the packages leave it alone it's just a debian stable running they're not changing so your own Club calendar information is it is totally separate I do not make this talk I have not integrated a calendar stuff for the work yet not sure I ever will we'll see yeah I'm glad super cool it's all GPL it's free software so you can install it on whatever you like I think you can do mail through it I haven't I use a different service for mail but it's super cool you can also I think you can also buy shared hosting through them to host an own cloud instance I know I would kind of feels like it feeds the purpose but whatever that's probably pretty good too yeah say just about the calendar it's really easy to get the org stuff out into iCal which then you can like maybe push the server and import into your calendar application god help you go in the other way can't like I don't down into back into org that's the part I'm still trying to solve yeah two-way sync seems super hard to me like I have a desktop calendar application and it can barely do two-way sync like reliably so I I don't have a lot of hopes for doing that with org but I'm sure it can be done yeah yeah so then the coming yeah it's hard to replace Google Calendar the comment was that there's an organ or a G Cal package which syncs well with Google Calendar which is cool I'm glad anything else work or um cloud or otherwise all right II have a lot more food there to eat so get on that guys thanks very much

Channel: thoughtbot

Views: 216,738

Rating: 4.8804278 out of 5

Keywords: thoughtbot, org mode, emacs, meetup, org

Id: SzA2YODtgK4

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2016