You Should Really Learn Org Mode - It's Easy

so I've been using emacs for quite a long time and one of the biggest things that convinced me to give it a try was the well-known and beautiful org mode org mode can be seen at a surface level as just a simple markup language but it's actually a very powerful tool as far as using it as a markup language you can use it just like markdown but it has quite a few extra features that make it I find a lot better for a lot of organizational things which is what most people use org mode for personally I use org mode for my day-to-day note-taking which I do quite a lot of I take quite a lot of notes as well as my to-do list and also for planning basically every single minute of my day since you have a scheduling feature and I even use it as my calendar that's not even taking into account the multitude of extensions out there that provide abilities to reference URLs and pull them in and download like images or even do something like say for example include sections of a completely different file in your org file and have it dynamically update for you that's another extension there's plenty of other ones out now as you know with a great power comes great responsibility and as you can imagine such a powerful tool often causes a lot of people to get freaked out kind of pushes people away from actually giving org mode a try people go like oh I don't need something like that or they say something like it's just too complicated to understand or I don't want to go down this rabbit hole and I feel like a lot of people don't really quite realize that org mode doesn't require you to use all of these different features in fact it's a lot more useful when you just use a few of the features and combine the ones that you want that's kind of how a lot of people end up using it now when people say that they don't actually need org mode um that is probably true you don't literally need it but I feel like a lot of people don't realize how much power it can offer them because it's basically one of the very few tools that allows you to basically use it for whatever you could possibly want now the second one obviously uh comes from a bit of shock when you see all the different packages out there you see all the crazy things people are doing with it and I totally understand where the shock and awe comes from I think if I wasn't coming into it with uh pretty open arms and willing to look at new things I probably would have thought I'll put that off and maybe look at it I don't know someday down in the future when I really want to go down a rabbit hole but not today now this video is meant to mostly demystify this idea that org mode is this huge the more you have to learn all this stuff it's actually really straightforward and in this video I'm just going to go over it and show you basically how you guys can get started using it right now and replace like a couple tools that you use right now and then where you guys can go to learn more and some of its actual power that you can use right out of the gate with what we've covered in this video so first of all let's not get things too complicated the actual process of using org mode at a surface level is really simple because it's basically just a markup language and right now you can actually go ahead and replace markdown with it pretty easily in a ton of places like GitHub supports it gitlab I believe supports it gideo which is like a self hosted alternative to GitHub supports it lots of different places support it and obviously since we're an emacs emac supports it um and basically every package supports working with org mode now the best way to get started is we'll go ahead and kind of go over the general syntax of how to make it we'll switch to the scratch buffer which should be there out of the box with emacs and what we'll do is we'll do org mode there we go and so now we have set the current buffer to use org mode so first thing we'll do is we will make a heading so in markdown a heading starts with a hash but in this case that is just a comment and so if we wanted to make a heading we would just do a star as the heading and then heading you'll notice that here I used a back tick that's just to escape the bullet there because if I went ahead and removed that sometimes it will or we'll try and recognize that as part of the syntax so I just put that there now for Bolding like I said before I just escaped these but that's not completely necessary so what we want to do to bold in markdown is we would use two stars on either side but that's not really necessary in org mode we can just do one star so star there star there and if we just did bold this um and we have stars on either side then it will bold it and then if we just typed normally beforehand um I have it set up to kind of hide these I'll put a link down to my DOT files if you guys want to look at how this is all set up but as you guys can see everything before and after is now highlighted only the stuff inside of the stars is highlighted now moving on to italicization italics if you will uh in markdown you would do stars but in org mode you do slashes which I think kind of makes sense it's like a tilted over so you want to tilt your word so uh italic and then slash and as you can see it's italicized next onto underscores there isn't really an agreed upon way to do this markdown it seems like it's implemented very differently in different implementations of the not spec I'd say spec and with really loose terms there isn't really a specification that it seems like everyone follows but common markdown seems to be it in org mode all it is is just underscore underline uh this and then just an underscore on the other side just like that now one that I end up using a lot is actually using um links now with org mode I find that this is pretty straightforward you just do one set of braces for the actual whole link to go in one set for the name and one set for the URL but in markdown you end up doing uh this strange amalgamation which I guess in theory is less typing but I find that I always forget which one goes on which side if I haven't used markdown in a while and a lot of things like to actually like use this very similar notation to this and the nice thing about links and URLs is that they can be really anything and there's a shorthand in emacs to enter links you can do control C control l and then I could do file and I can give it the path to a file desk and then it will insert a URL which can be quite nice now one that I end up using a lot is actually using um links now with org mode I find that this is pretty straightforward you just do one set of braces for the actual whole link to go in one set for the name and one set for the URL oops um but in markdown you end up doing uh this strange amalgamation which I guess in theory is less typing but I find that I always forget which one goes on which side um if I haven't used markdown in a while and a lot of things like to actually like use this very similar notation to this and the nice thing about links and URLs is that they can be really anything and there's a shorthand in emacs to enter links you can do control C control l and then I can do file and I can give it the path to a file desk and then it will insert a URL which can be quite nice and now we get into quoting so this one is sometimes used it's not quite as common to actually see people quoting things but basically the notation in markdown would be a right angle bracket and then your quote but in emacs it's a little strange you're going to do hash plus begin underscore and then quote um to start a quote and then to end a quote you're going to do hash plus end uh quote which I realize is a little strange and then my quote here um now this is I guess like fine a lot of people will probably find this to be a little too verbose for them which is pretty understandable and luckily there is a actual built-in feature um that I mentioned right here in my show notes I'll link these down below as long as I remember and you can basically access them with a little shorthand which is a left angle bracket left angle bracket and then a Q and then hit Tab and that will expand to a quote block and you can do the same thing with an S and hit Tab and it will give you a source code block which is really helpful all you got to do is just require a temp org Tempo in your init.el or if you use use package you can do use package demand T just to ensure that it's actually being loaded but uh for anyone that doesn't use use packages you can just require it it's fine it doesn't take too long to load now a question you might be wondering is what are the actual benefits of using this over org mode and the big thing for me is these extra features that it adds to the actual markup language so something that you can use and a lot of other things tend to do to do this is using tags which I think are just a I think there's a bunch of different ways to write them you could do a tag like that or a putting uh colons on either side I think is how this is done in markdown and a lot of people kind of try to like fake a lot of these features with that but having it natively built in means that basically anything that recognizes markdown or sorry org mode can actually use them so the first one is to do states so you could do to do at the start of a heading and that will set it to a to do state and then you can do if you want a shorthand you can do control C control T and this will give you all the options so I've got an extra few extra ones here but I wanted to just set it as done I can just hit D and it marks it as done and it even gives it like a date that it was closed on and you can do shift and arrow keys to kind of cycle between these um but yeah so going back to to do so this can be pretty helpful I find that this is really the biggest benefit for project management you can do like bulleted lists um which I guess is like not not the worst this thing here so you can do bulleted lists um just like I showed just now um they're just basically um a dash and then square brackets and then whatever you want to type and this can be helpful and you even have uh the ability to Nest them and then you can hit Ctrl C Ctrl C to just check them off um and these have like some benefits but in reality I only use those for very small things like picking up groceries and I tend to stick to actually using the to-do headings for most of my project management now another useful thing is actually being able to mark a priority the easiest way to do this is just to do shift up and down to like kind of change the priority um but basically all they are is just square brackets and then a hash um to basically say what it is and you have like a b c and you can add extra ones I usually use these for whenever I have like nested to Do's with an in a heading so like I said before like we have headings and you can just add extra Stars so two stars makes it the next level um three stars makes it the level after that um and so on and so on so uh second heading and so say I've got let's say we've got uh three headings so these are all to do now I can actually prioritize them with just uh some simple priorities just like that and so this can kind of help me rank things and I can refer to these as kind of like the priority of what needs to get done and another one that I use very heavily is the actual time stamps um which include like a deadline a schedule and just a general time stamp so to insert a timestamp such as a deadline or a schedule there's a little shortcut which is Ctrl C Ctrl s to schedule something and there's like this little calendar interface here it's kind of blocked off by my notes off to the side but if I just move those over there's this little notes interface but I usually like to just kind of describe the day so uh let's just do um I don't know May 10th and it will schedule that for May 10th and I can even change like uh 1 pm and I can say oh it's going to take like an hour so let's do plus one for one hour and I will schedule it for May 10th from one to two um I think there's a way to actually change how this is displayed uh so it's not in military time but uh I didn't do that and then you have deadlines as well which I mentioned right here and to set a deadline you can do uh Ctrl C Ctrl D this will set a deadline let's just remove that just like before and you can like navigate this with the shift arrow keys to kind of like change what date you have and you're looking at but sometimes I'll just do say for example if I want this uh for Friday um 3 P.M and then you have a schedule time and a deadline which can be quite helpful mostly for the fact that uh uh it usually just like gives you like a time say for example uh if you're in school say you have a deadline for an assignment and you want to schedule time to work on it that's kind of when I would use the scheduled times now in addition you can also add extra timestamps so you could say for example like um this is going to happen on and then you can do Ctrl C Dot and this will let you insert a timestamp let's just say this one's on Thursday uh 2 P.M and then you insert a timestamp um right where you are and this will be usable in plenty of other different contexts I'll kind of show this off in a little bit when we get back to it but this is a nice way say for example if you want to say things that already happened and they're not really scheduled or a deadline that could be helpful as well now really quickly I kind of wanted to show you guys how you can start using this right away so like I said before you could create a hidden heading like I said before with one star adding here um you can create a subheading this is it don't forget that my actual things that I'm typing are down here so you can actually follow along if you want and then maybe we want to do a list of thing to do oh these should be to-do lists actually just go like that and then other thing there we go so we've got all these things to do and then now we could actually manage all of these so let's go ahead and turn these into Stars actually yeah there we go so we've got all these to do's and as you saw there's a really easy way to switch these around like I said before this is more of a showcase section so if you don't want to see that uh you can move on to the next part which will actually show off the actual benefits here now hopefully that didn't scare you guys away um the point of that was mostly just to Showcase what is possible um if you guys want to get into this I recommend looking at a few different things I remember I recommend looking at or capture it gives you a getting things done style way to capture ideas tasks to do yada yada I have that bound to control c c and it gives you this nice little interface I could say to do and then I can type in what I want to do and it gives you a way to describe templates um which can be very helpful uh next thing I'd recommend is looking into org export which can actually be used by doing control C control e and this will give you a bunch of different ways to export your org file to things like as you can see here you can export it to an i calendar HTML law Tech a DOT an open document file I can't remember what it is it's what they use for LibreOffice plain text and plenty more so you can actually export it to markdown if you ever wanted to do that for whatever reason and then org agenda which is what I was just showing before which can be accessed with the org agenda command um and there's lots of configuration options system Crafters has a really great video on org agenda as well as pro has a great video I'll link both those down below um highly recommend taking a look at those um and yeah and then another thing that I recommend taking a look at is uh org roam or groom is kind of similar to the Rome application if you've ever heard of it but aurogram is not built in and it kind of takes a different approach it tries to use org for a different approach to note taking than what I use I like to kind of do a laissez-faire approach where I just throw throw notes into files and track them all manually which is probably not very well thought out so maybe one day I'll give orgrom a try but I don't use it at the moment anyways guys I know that was a pretty short overview uh really the whole point of this was to not get too complicated and hopefully I didn't scare some of you guys away when I tried to show the more intricate features of org and what you can do with it there's a lot of other stuff you can do you can actually have it integrated with your phone there's an Android app that integrates great I use its widget all the time for kind of my checking to see what I've got next in my daily schedule that sort of stuff as well as an IOS app that has become pretty popular and actually even though it's newer than the Android one I think it's actually at least gotten close to it in feature set which is really impressive it's got an active community so I highly recommend taking a look at that and it can integrate with a bunch of other tools there's a way to actually access your org files from a browser there's lots of stuff out there but I first of all just kind of recommend looking at it as a markdown format and then when you want to try out some of these other things that are out there just try them one at a time they're all meant to be interchangeable you don't need to use all of them um so don't get to don't feel like you have to learn a lot you can just try it at a surface level and work from there first of all I wanted to give a big shout out to my GitHub sponsors I really appreciate all of you um I wanted to shout out Brian Jenks and platinus thanks you guys for supporting me on GitHub sponsors it really means a lot now for my patreon supporters I see that we've got quite a few new ones so I appreciate all your guys's support we have Will Taylor Andre tart uh Tarkin tariken I'm not really too sure on that one so if you feel like correcting me I'd really appreciate it Alexander arcamenco once again correct me on the last name Jim Lawson Miguel Russell Willis and Connor g once again you guys I really appreciate all the support that you guys have done um it really means a lot to me anyways guys that's it for today thanks and I'll see you next time

Channel: Gavin Freeborn

Views: 46,276

Keywords: org-mode, org, emacs, vim, markdown, latex, agenda, orgmode

Id: 0-brF21ShRk

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2022