How I Use org-capture and Stuff

you hello Jonathan are any of you on the Emax IRC channel ever anyone yeah okay so I mean so I'm your uncle drawn there I've been there for a really long time longer than I care to admit and I'm really good friends with everybody and they're a wonderful group so if you're not on the IRC channel I highly recommend that you come and spend some time on the IRC Channel great place to be great place to ask questions great place to answer questions you'd be surprised how much you know compared to a beginner like think about where you were a few years ago a few months ago a few days ago it's a really great community there I work for a company called Cigna which you've probably heard of because it may supply your health insurance just a quick plug they sponsor not the meet up but they sponsor me and my research I'm a computer scientist over on their Big Data team and we're actually hiring right now so if you're a scholar developer if you're a Python developer if you're a JavaScript developer if you love Hadoop or something like that and you're looking for a change or you know someone who needs work or something you know thanks to flat bot for letting me put the plug in here so that I can keep these opportunities in the family so to speak first our office is actually we work charging bull right now but we're building a huge huge installation on the east side it's really exciting yeah we're about to to grow our New York capacity so how many of you use org-mode ok all right that is what I okay so I was really nervous this morning as I was coming into to work I was on the subway and I'm thinking about this talk and I'm like what if I show up and no one uses org-mode ok who doesn't use org-mode and wants a really quick recap X this is like my dream come true I don't have to give the recap alright I'll do it anyway because some someone may be watching this by video org-mode is one of the coolest things that Emacs has and that says a lot it is an organizational note-taking tool calendaring tool time tracking tool and I can name a bunch of ways that I don't use Emacs which would be a much longer or don't use org-mode but that would be a much larger talk but I'm going to talk today about org capture I primarily use org for the longer-term storage of information capturing stuff like that I don't really use it for time tracking I don't really use it for spread cheating or generating invoices automatically based on tasks that I perform although I know a lot of people do that successfully I'll occasionally use it for publishing because you don't have to write law tech anymore if you just write in org-mode and it's really it's that good I'm honestly shocked that it works so well considering that I use law Tech and you could probably see that these slides are made with with la tech as well yeah no I didn't I didn't use Oregon store dream work I was thinking to myself should I can should I figure out how to use it and then I was like I am just so lazy and I did it so so I wrote these by hand so org capture is this great feature of org-mode and lets you record content from anywhere so you set a global hotkey which I'll show you how to do by the way this is a screen shot free code only presentation so that's the kind of thing you like them this is this is for you um the great thing I'm thrilled I'm happy to be here too the great thing about org capture is that it has configurable templates so you can define the types of things that you want to capture you can say well I find myself capturing mostly notes of this type it would be great if I had a prefilled template that I could capture XY and z bits of information you would say alright this is really great I use it for journaling umm I use it for putting tasks on to my to-do lists that's probably the one dynamic feature of org-mode that I really do use is a to-do list and at the end of the day it stores it in or demote file so you get all of the benefits that you would have any way of organ wood files which is their plain text they're basically future proof and they're really easy to parse I encourage you to check the org-mode manual has a wonderful section as well as the worg does on on the orchid website the worg for those of you who don't know is the org-mode wiki it's or demote files interlinked with one another in a git repo so it's really easy to contribute so if you have a tidbit or something that you want to share I highly recommend that you go ahead and contribute it to the work and you should definitely go and read the or capture section in the manual if to something if it's something that you're curious about so I use or capture in really four specific ways I use it when I'm coding I'll oftentimes record interesting code snippets that I find it's really easy you can highlight a piece of code you can initiate or capture and it'll bring it in properly and then later off sometimes I'll go in and I'll do orc babble if it's self contained like if I'm writing Emacs Lisp or something and then I have like a live it's it's sort of sort of like taking a live animal and putting it into a specimen jar and not having to worry about it dying which is really nice because I've had some bad experiences so when I'm reading I'll often record quotes or excerpts which are really handy and then I'll categorize them like that I used to be part of a distributed team and the distributed I'm still part of a distributed team but we were also time-shifted we had some people on the west coast so our morning stand-ups actually ended up being done by email so in order to keep track of it I am I created a stand up template for my for my daily stand-up thing so I would do that and then what was really nice is at the end of the month I could export that months stand-up stuff to like a PDF or something and send it in to my manager review it or print it out and be like wow this is all the stuff that I did this month it was it was really good a personal exercise and of course journaling to record thoughts and feelings both of which I have a lot of so two important things to begin with you're definitely going to want to set your your global key map I use CC C so ctrl C and then you hit C organoid uses ctrl C a lot it uses it sort of like as the default for everything so I thought why not just that everywhere and I because I really like UTF and I also write a lot in other languages I read a lot in Hebrew which is kind of a pain for right-to-left stuff so I like to make sure extra special sure that my export coding system is set to utf-8 which is really really nice so I get beautiful exported things like that so here's a this is my to-do list this is real this is actual working code this is my to-do list or capture template it's all in line there so you can see the first thing you have is you sort of add you start you make this list or capture templates the hotkey is T so I go CC I I do ctrl C C and then I just hit T it gives me a menu and I hit T and then all of a sudden I'm editing a task and it's really really nice so the name is to-do list item the type is entry it's as nice macro there's this little domain-specific language that people wrote for defining this so it's really nice I want to hit the heading type and the title so I want it to be a file plus headline which is something cool if you haven't looked at eight trees and org modes ability to do date trees and stuff this will seem a little bit confusing it's the subject of a totally different talk so I'm not going to going to go into it now but I'll show you where I do differ so I want to file plus headline I want it to go in org default notes file and I want it to be under the heading of tasks and this is the actual template itself that's it that's that tiny little line is all that I need so I'll show you how how how those variables work the the template is stored in a file sometimes and here you can see I'm doing file date trees so here you can do ctrl c CJ and all of a sudden now you have a journal entry it's also an entry I'm going to do a file that I do file date tree in org Journal dot org which is right now huge it's like really really really large file to several times a day output in journal entries and the great thing about it is that date trees will organize it by it'll organize it by year it'll organize it by month it'll organize it by day and then you get beautiful time stamped journal entries that are just sort of fall into place really really nicely and it's all in active timestamps so it doesn't like mess up agenda view or anything like that which is really helpful and then you just specify path to the file here and I keep mine in my dotting xfd folder I have a directory in there or templates I just use or cap template as the file suffix but you can use whatever you want it just it just reads the file it doesn't look for a special suffix ER and anything like that so here's my journal template it's just a little % some action there that is something I'm going to explain later and this will yield something like this so it will give me you can start to see what the stand-alones do I have a table on the next slide that little present you gives me on inactive timestamp it said this is only a test there is my title and then here's the actual content which I wrote it's not for the test journal entry for the purposes of illustration this actually exists in my journal I didn't delete it so now you can see inside my journal yeah you're welcome so so here are the capture template placeholders that I use the most they're actually quite a lot of them I highly recommend you check out the man page they're really really interesting and they're really also very useful so that one gives you the inactive timestamp that syntax next the second one from the top will gate will give you the ability to prompt for something so in this case it'll prompt for name you can make that any string you want I'll show you something really cool you can do with that prompt in the next couple of slides or just you know get yourselves ready and then you can do annotation which use or extort link if you don't know how org store link works I'm not going to go and do it now but it's very cool and it helps you maintain a link back to what it was that you were working on so you can actually just get a nice clickable link in your organ will take you back to the file that you were working on so you never lose your place which is really really hot stuff present' i will give you the active region so remember how i was talking about you can highlight a region of code you can highlight a region of text something like that that's something that I'll do pretty often and finally you have percent question mark and that's where the cursor ends up so once you're done filling out the template what happens is or pops up or org-mode pops up arrowed buffer for you and lets you put all of your typing stuff there so sometimes I'll have a template where I won't even fill in more than what is more than what I'm prompt for so I'll actually use number two quite a lot where you prompt for the name sometimes I'll have a template which is just made up of that and that's really really helpful so here's a great thing you can do you can do select from lists the prompts so you can actually have a prompt called tidbit and you can give it you know it's a quote it's a zinger it's a one-liner it's a text lit it's whatever and it'll give you autocomplete in the mode line sorry in the middie buffer so you can get a really really nice way to go ahead and quickly file a bunch of things right so I'll use this during meetings sometimes if I have a bunch of agenda items or if I have a bunch of things which I know I need to then dispatch or whatever this is really really really helpful and this is what I use for my tidbit capture that I showed you you can see it's the same thing it has filed yeah file headlines it's actually really really simple and here's my tip that capture template that uses that multi-select have complete beautiful autocomplete save save time save money so I have the possible inspiration piece which shows you that work store link and then the active region that was there so it'll show you what I wanted and I wanted to and this concludes my lightning talk so yeah so that's or encapture are there any questions it's okay if they're on it's okay if it's a file yes doesn't present as a list structure it has meaning can partials elipse lisp structures you can parse most things as a little sub structure and what does this think it's so so I break it up in the ends of different files so I have one journal file I have one to do file and I'm pretty routinely with the exception of the journal file I'm pretty routinely keeping those tidy and moving them into archive files the org-mode parser is quite efficient and has been tuned by many people far far smarter than i know how to do really good parsing and really good parsing and Emacs Lisp using all the the cool Emacs text internals for for reading stuff in so yeah that's that but um the really the largest file I have is probably approaching a meg and it's a journal no I mean I don't I have a have a quad-core MacBook Pro with an SSD and like you know brazilians of RAM so I don't really yeah yeah I've never seen an Oregon file approaching a gig I've just never seen that but that would be a fascinating problem to have to solve Emacs does have a big does anyone know it has a big file mode Emacs has like a huge file mode or it does like incremental reading or something it works horribly I tried to use it once on a really really large text file because I'm a big data guy so I was thinking about maybe doing big data with Emacs and that ended just horribly but it was so much fun to try so yeah so that's yes I don't know but you can have a lots of different arbitrary hierarchy within an aardvark file so if you have things which are even tangentially related in fact the let me go back to it headline file date tree file date tree actually creates a fairly fairly heavily nested Bay tree if you don't know about org day tree again you should probably check out it's got really really nice support for following things based on time it's got really excellent calendaring support it does a whole lot I've seen people do things with organ capture where they'll have entire events that and synched to that get captured put into their organs and then later gets inked by a script to their Google Calendar so it just sort of sort of shows up on their foot which is just the coolest thing so I don't really know in the capacity that I've used org capture I generally don't generate a whole lot of content I probably use or capture maybe maybe three or four times a day I'd say and each time it so it's a pretty small entry let's just be that somebody else all right thanks again thanks for having me

Channel: thoughtbot

Views: 32,196

Rating: 4.7641511 out of 5

Keywords: Emacs (Software), org-capture, thoughtbot, New York City (City/Town/Village), Meetup (Website)

Id: KdcXu_RdKI0

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2015