Xah Lee makes Org-Mode easy for non-technical people - and Org-Mode as 2-pane outliner

Posted by JBfrom
Sep 27, 2011 at 02:54 PM

I’ve decided to shift my focus away from any attempt to market or promote Cyborganize and instead just build a clearer product. So no, this is merely sharing an enthusiastic discovery I made yesterday, not trying to promote it to people who have no idea what Emacs is.

But I’m happy to clarify -

Emacs is one of the original text editors. It began as a collection of macros before there were any of the operating systems we use today. It can do a tremendous number of things, and is primarily a tool for people like programmers and sys admins. However it also has extremely powerful writing and outlining and GTD capabilities, many of which are contained in the package Org-Mode.

The reason I’m excited about Xah’s page is that it cuts through all the technical voodoo for the programmers and gives you the info necessary to use it as a writer. It is the best resource I’ve found for this purpose, by a very large margin. However it doesn’t really tackle the question of “what is Emacs and why should I use it.” For that question, see the Cyborganize page where I link to this pdf: http://therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for-writers.pdf

The “Emacs Basics” article that is the first link on Xah’s page will teach you how to use Emacs as a basic text editor. If you use Xah’s distro, you won’t have to learn the odd Emacs keybindings for basic editing functions like copy/paste.

BrainStormWFO is an outliner that lets you rapidly reorganize an outline. It performs this function faster than any other outliner. However its design is highly specialized which makes it less than ideal for other kinds of tasks, like writing long documents. Fortunately it imports and exports plain text outlines well to other programs that can handle those tasks.

Lastly, I felt it was imperative to share the little-known indirect buffer trick because with it you can duplicate nearly all of BrainStormWFO’s functionality in Org-Mode except for bookmark and hotkey sorting, which makes it comparable to the vast bulk of 2-pane outliners discussed here, not to mention its metadata or “third pane” features.