Taking Notes In Emacs Org-Mode

hi my name is Tony colitis and you're watching I learn things common so 13 taking notes in emacs org-mode you're anything like me you've used dozens of applications to organize your notes and take notes and keep track of everything that you need to do today I want to show you one option which I've used recently to great success and that is using a text editor called Emacs and specifically within Emacs using what's called org-mode great thing about Emacs is that it's free and open source software it's highly customizable and runs on multiple platforms I use it at work running off a keychain and also at home on my computer in my laptops like I said it's open-source software it's mainly intended to be a programming platform for editing text files but works really great as a note-taking system if you use it in conjunction with org-mode Emacs is available again for free by going to the website and downloading it for the platform of your choice later this tutorial I'm going to show you how to install it in Ubuntu from the command line org mode is a mode for Emacs that specifically is tailored to creating outlines quickly and making to-do lists and taking notes all right so let's get started by installing Emacs I'm using Ubuntu 1404 and I'm going to show you how to install it from the command line open up a terminal and type in sudo apt-get install Emacs this will install the latest version of Emacs for you which is currently version 24 we can test this by type in Emacs - - version and you see here the version that it was installed was twenty-four point three point one to launch Emacs we can time Emacs from the command line or use the unity launcher by default Emacs comes with this welcome screen which been disabled by going to customize startup and changing the inhibit startup screen toggle from off to on you can pay to apply and save the next time we launch Emacs it will not show that welcome screen all right so let's get started with the org-mode to create a new file go to the file menu and select visit new file I'll ask you where you want to save the file we'll just go ahead and save it in our home directory call it to do org the.org extension is standard for org-mode but really you can name it anything you want because we ended our file in dot o-r-g it's automatically selected org-mode if you name your files something else you can switch to org mode by pressing alt X on the keyboard and typing or - mode like I said work mode is designed to quickly create outlines to create a bullet points hold down alt on the keyboard and hit enter then you can then type in texts of the first item by holding down alt and hitting Enter again you create a new bullet point and again we can repeat the process you can quickly and easily create sub bullets by hitting alt enter on the keyboard and then halt right arrow creates a sub item you can tell that it's the sub item because it added an extra star at the end let's see after we wake up we're going to brush our teeth and if you hit alt enter again it's going to create a new bullet at the same level of the previous one so you can see that it inserted two stars instead of one now we can change the order of these items by holding down alt and hitting up arrow or down arrow now we can hold move whole branches if we hold down alt and down arrow on the appropriate level you can see wake up we're moving along with all the sub items so this is a quick quick way to organize all your thoughts and again you just move them around by holding down alt and up or down now you can change the indentation of a particular item by holding down alt on the keyboard and either right or left all right now if you try to move an item up or down but it's the only item in its particular level it's not going to move anything as you can see right here when I hit alt up or down it doesn't change like a ready line let's go ahead and return that to its previous state you can mark an item as to do by holding down shift on your keyboard and right arrow if you hit shift + left arrow then it removes it to D let's change all of these to to-do items and let's create some more here for lunch okay and make some more to-do items now if you want instead of creating to-do items you can also create checkboxes to create a check box go ahead and hit enter make sure you're at the same indentation level starting on the new line with a minus sign space then open bracket space closed bracket you can see a box that I created change color slightly and slightly bolded to indicate that it's now a check box and we're going to create a grocery list of things that we need to make or create for to eat breakfast so let's say eggs if you Dalton enter it's going to create a new line for you to create the check box again just open bracket space closed bracket and bacon and we'll have one more all right so now we have eggs bacon and pancakes all of these checkboxes are currently empty but you can mark them as selected by moving your cursor into one of the boxes holding down control on the keyboard and typing C and then C again again that's control C control C so now we've it puts an X in that spot now when you if you want to see the progress of your check list on the upper level in this case we have the bullet point four eight after the each item we can type in Open bracket and slash and then close bracket after we've done that it changes it to red and if you move your cursor inside that box in hold hit control C control C it now gives us a the number of items in our check list as well as the number of items that have been completed currently we have zero of three done but if we move over down to the X check list and Mark that is completed by hitting ctrl c ctrl C you'll see this dynamically changes from zero to one and if we continue down the list you can do that until we've completed the list one seven is that it changes to green so that you know your checklist is done if you have control C control C on any checkbox it removes the checkmark now instead of having a the number of items you can also change that the percentage by instead of using a slash using a percentage in this particular box so now that we've used percentage if we move our cursor into that box in a control C control C it'll give us a percentage of the number of items that are done and if we go through our check list and hit control C control see that value dynamic dynamically updates depending on the number of items that are checked ok another useful thing to do in Emacs or mode is set deadlines let's say we wanted to set a deadline for going home to do that you would hit ctrl C ctrl D for deadlines then you can select the date of when you want to do it let's go ahead and make sure we go home today you can see it inserts a special formatted piece of text which is essentially a property with a date stamp now once you this starts getting larger and larger you may want to tag your specific items by assigning them keywords this is often done in the getting things done or GTD method of organizing your work by creating tags for items depending on what your resources are or where you want to do the particular work so let's go ahead and create some tags for our major items here and the way you create a tag is simply by making sure your cursor is on the item or the bullet point that you need to tag for and then hitting ctrl c ctrl c on the bottom here you can see that it prompts you for a tag and we're going to enter home because that's something we do at home the tag then is displayed on the right-hand side here you can eat is something we do at home and the lunch we will have at work and going to work is again something we do at work and working more is something we do at work and then going home is something that we'll do at home as you can see the orders seem to have changed here I'm going to want to move this go to work before eat and like I said before you emacs org-mode allows you to move these bullet points around fairly easily by holding down alt on the keyboard and then up arrow see now we've moved go to work before eat but actually we'll want it after eating breakfast but before lunch there we go so as you can see your to-do list can get quite large pretty fast now the nice thing about org mode is that you can hide sections of it very easily by putting your cursor over one of the main bullet points and just hitting tab automatically hides all the text or all the sub items for that particular item and you can tell that it's hidden by the bullet points that it creates over here you can do that on more than one particular bullet item or changing the view of everything that is shown in org mode by holding down Shift + tab and if you keep pressing shift tab it will cycle through the different levels of indentation one thing to note is that the checklist even though it's a sub item of eat is not shown because it's not a different bullet point level if we were to expand that particular section by putting our cursor over eat and hitting tabs and we can see the checklist again shift tab to cycle through all the items so that's a quick way to navigate your to-do list you can also just move your cursor to particular item and then hitting tab to expand that okay so now that we've created a couple of items that need to be done let's mark some of them as done to change a to-do item to done just put your cursor over that to-do line and hit shift and right arrow if you hit right arrow again it's going to remove the tick of the line entirely all right so here you can see we've done those three things but we still have a few more things to get done to save your file you can either go to the file menu and select save or hit control X control S in addition to using shift tab or tab to show and hide the different levels of your outline org-mode also offers what's called an agenda view that'll let you filter for specific to-do items or specific keywords in order to enable the agenda view for your for the document that you're working on you have to press ctrl C open bracket on the keyboard on the bottom of the screen you will see that the file has been moved to the front of the agenda file list once you've enabled the agenda view for this particular file you can see the various options by typing alt X on the keyboard and then org - agenda you'll see this little screen pop up here on the bottom and it will give you the keyboard shortcuts that you would press to get the different agenda views we're going to start with this one right here which is agenda and all - dues a set of two commands so if we press n on the keyboard you'll get a new view here and the new view will show you a timeline of the different events and here you can see the deadline that we set for going home on Friday August 15th and you can also see a list of all the to-do items that have not been done yet now as you can tell the to-do items that we've marked as done or not shown here so it's only showing us the ones that we still need to do so that's a handy way to quickly filter your different files if you want to jump to a specific to-do item you can just click on it with your mouse in it enter and I'll bring your screen back to that specific to-do item now as you do see the screen is split in two in order to remove the split you would hit control X 0 and then we're back to our original file there is another agenda view that I would like to show you an organ and that is using the keywords that we set to home and worked in order to filter the file that we're currently working on in order to get that again just type in all 2x and then org - agenda and now we can filter by keywords by pressing the letter M it's going to ask us what we want to match so let's say we just want to look at the things that we would do when we're at home since we've already set the home keyword we can just type in the word home now just remember that this matches case-sensitive so if you created a tag with a capital H you have to make sure that you type in the capital H as well when you try to match the keyword as you can see it's created a list of all the items that we've marked with the keyword home to exit the screen screen just press Q on the keyboard if we only want to see that to-do items that have not been done that are also marked with the tag home we can do that as well you can just type in all to X then org - agenda and instead of a little M we're going to type in capital M it's going to ask us what keyword to match and we'll just type in home and this time instead of showing us all the items that were marked as home it's only showing us that to-do items that also have the tag home that have not been done yet so far in this tutorial we've only just barely begun to scratch the surface of what's possible in Emacs and emacs org-mode if you're interested in learning more I highly suggest that you look at the documentation which you can get to by clicking on org on the menu and then going down to a documentation and info documentation here you'll see all the documentation for org-mode and it's highly recommended that you read through as much as you can in order to get a handle and all the features that are available to you if you want more information about Emacs in general Emacs comes with a built-in tutorial and you can get to that by clicking on the help menu and then selecting Emacs tutorial well the keyboard shortcut would be ctrl H and then T I would highly recommend that if you never use the Mac so for that you go through this tutorial so that you can learn all the keyboard shortcuts because keyboard shortcuts in Emacs will greatly improve your productivity and really help you make the most out of this very powerful text editor well that's it for me in this tutorial I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you next time

Channel: ilearnthings.com

Views: 112,578

Rating: 4.8566036 out of 5

Keywords: Emacs (Software), Org-mode, Note-taking, Software (Industry), Open Source, Free Software, Linux, Ubuntu

Id: bzZ09dAbLEE

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 18 2014