On: Ask HN: How do you organise/integrate all the information in your life?

[_a3w4]

Emacs.

   - Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda.
   - Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol.
   - Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el.
   - Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm.
   - Financial tools. ledger.
   - Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda.
   - Files on disk. dired, org-mode.
   - General notes. Org-mode.
   - Literate programming. org-babel.
   - Mail. mu4e.
   - rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email.
   - git. magit.
   - irc. erc.
   - ...

[patrickdavey → _a3w4]

Org-Mode is the one thing that makes me want to move from vim to emacs.. but I just don't feel like investing the time in getting proficient with emacs at this stage.

[dangom → patrickdavey]

The transition couldn't be easier with Spacemacs:

http://spacemacs.org/ https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

[a7f4 → patrickdavey]

evil (extensible Vi layer for Emacs) made it (switch vim -> emacs) possible for me

[westurner → patrickdavey]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode#Integration lists a number of Vim extensions with OrgMode support.

... "What is the best way to avoid getting "Emacs Pinky"?" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/52492/what-is-the-best-wa...

[flukus → westurner]

They are all pale imitations of what org-mode offers.

[nextos → patrickdavey]

It's not as difficult as it seems. Actually I'd say that if you already know GNU Readline shortcuts (which are very helpful on e.g. Bash), it's an afternoon of work to learn the basics.

The problem is that most tutorials depict emacs as a bag of keyboard shortcuts. But in reality, there are some simple principles that are quite understandable.

And org-mode is so underappreciated. You can turn it into anything. I use it as a wiki and a kanban board. And it's amazing.

[kanbannoman → nextos]

Do you mind telling me how you use kanban? I tried kanban.el but couldnt get it to update and populate the table, is there any way that emacs can auto-update live the kanban board based on todo states of items?? (e.g. if you hit shift + right for todo it is automatically seen in the todo column, without having to revert the file?)

[nextos → kanbannoman]

Sure. I don't like kanban.el much.

After a lot of though, I had a little epiphany. Vanilla org-mode is great as a kanban as long as you don't try to visualize it as a table. One should use an outline instead. org-mode is an extension of outline-mode, so this should not be surprising.

Then everything is simple. Create custom states (I have TODO, PROG, WAIT & DONE). Agenda commands show you summarized views of the kanban. You can customize stuff with a bit of elisp, but org-mode as it is works great.

Note the outline version of a kanban is still 2D, as a table, but strictly more powerful (as you can nest tasks, add text) which would be next to impossible in a table.

[palunon → nextos]

>The problem is that most tutorials depict emacs as a bag of keyboard shortcuts. But in reality, there are some simple principles that are quite understandable.

Do you know one that doesn't ?

[nextos → palunon]

Unfortunately, I don't. But I plan to write one soon.

[patrickdavey → nextos]

Please do write it! What I love about vim is that it is (to me anyway) a DSL for editing a document. The language has verbs "delete, copy, change" and nouns (paragraph, document, line) etc. that you can learn and combine. So once you understand how the language works, you can do a huge amount with it.

I'd love to see a similar thing for emacs, outlining how it is supposed to be used and explored and fits together.

[wwkeyboard → patrickdavey]

You don't have to switch editors. For the past few years I've moved between rubymine, pycharm, and atom for coding while still having emacs open for my org-mode notes.

[gglitch → wwkeyboard]

OOC, why not also code in Emacs?

[_a3w4 → patrickdavey]

You can try Emacs with evil (extensible vi layer). It's still a major time investment though.

[llamaz → _a3w4]

Only because it's hard to learn to configure emacs. With spacemacs, it's less of a problem, since things work sanely out of the box.

[jxy → llamaz]

With spacemacs, …, things work _insanely_ out of the box

Honestly, you don't need any extra stuff, other than `evil' if you want vim bindings. (`Viper' works fine if you grok vi.)

[laxatives → _a3w4]

Can you set up phone alarms/reminders with org-agenda or something similar?

[_a3w4 → laxatives]

I can think of two easy solutions. One would be to synchronize Google Calendar and org-agenda and let Google Calendar manage the alarms/reminders in the phone. This already exists.

The other solution would be to develop an app which polls emacs/org-mode for alarms/reminders. AFAIK this doesn't exist but it would be pretty easy to make.

[fulafel → _a3w4]

Can org-mode sync to CalDAV servers? Then you could use eg. Sandstorm.io's hosted Radicale app.

[girzel → fulafel]

There are a few packages that do that, here's one that does two-way syncing: https://github.com/dengste/org-caldav

I use it to sync with a Radicale server.

[mcshicks → laxatives]

I really mostly use the agenda view, but if I really want reminders on the go (like I'm taking a trip) I use MobileOrg and the android client with dropbox.

http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html

[du_bing → _a3w4]

Great solution!

[humancool → _a3w4]

This should be the best approach. I thumb up.