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Beginning to see the light with org-mode
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Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 8, 2015 at 04:16 PM
zoe wrote:
>I’m in the process of writing some blog posts about org-mode and why
>it’s great. I’ll post links here as they’re written.
Great! Looking forward to reading them.
Posted by jaslar
Dec 12, 2015 at 07:41 AM
CRIMPing emacs (a field report)
WHAT I WANTED
* A capable markdown editor
* Good editing commands
* The ability to fold subheadings and text
* The ability to navigate and rearrange by subtree
* The ability to work with more than one file at a time
* Spellcheck
* The ability to export into a variety of useful formats: html, odt, doc, pdf, OPML
* The ability to edit files from Dropbox on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android
WHAT I GOT (in mostly emacs markdown-mode):
* On Windows, I got everything above except for the export functions from within markdown (although I could get html file and preview in Linux). But I’ve downloaded pandoc, which allows a separate command line program (not difficult syntax) to do a remarkable, and very fast job of all kinds of translations. I can also export from within org directly to most formats.
The key discoveries:
* I had to learn how to add a package to emacs. Short version: add some lines to the .emacs configuration file to call the “melpa” packages, issue the menu command to Option>Manage emacs packages > Click on and install markdown-mode. Now I can launch a file ending with .md or .markdown.
* Learn how to configure (through the use of /C-h v /programname/) two important variables: sentence-end-double-space (to change from two to one, giving me the ability to move the cursor by sentence), and ispell-program-name (Windows doesn’t have an ispell program, so I had to download aspell and tell emacs where it was—this step was unnecessary in Linux)
* Use the Option menu to set a new default font
* Use the Option menu to set line wrapping to visual line mode (soft wraps)
* Use the Option menu to swap the emacs cut/copy/paste option to the more usual C-x, C-c, C-v. This also allows the more usual select-and-replace process.
* Use the Option menu to save these customizations
* Use Manage emacs packages again to upgrade org itself, and customize org export backends (package-install RET org; and C-h v org-export-backends)
* Realize that I could indeed move whole subtrees - provided the last subtree was blank.
* Install Editorial on iOS and JotterPad on Android (although the latter does not support folding)
CONCLUSIONS:
Hey, hours of fun! A CRIMPers paradise.
A free and powerful application (if you don’t count, say, 40 hours of learning curve and experimentation).
By the end, a really seamless, capable editor that feels pretty good, and is better in many ways than haroopad (no spellcheck) and Smartdown (funny cursor movement by line). I think it gives WriteMonkey a run for its money, too, but that’s mainly (for me) because WriteMonkey doesn’t do folding. I could write a book with this.
Because the learning curve was so steep, I hope some of the steps here will help other CRIMPers who desire such tweaks. I have more detailed steps for those who want them.
Posted by zoe
Dec 12, 2015 at 12:34 PM
Thanks for giving a breakdown of what you’ve done so far.
You should know that there is pandoc-mode! You can install it from melpa and it adds the pandoc options to your toolbar, and there you have all your export options from Markdown to whatever format you like. This is an improvement in two ways: first, it allows you to take advantage of pandoc from within your document workflow; it also gives pandoc a decent GUI menu instead of having to invoke everything from the command line. It’s a minor mode so it won’t interfere with markdown-mode.
I’ve begun to integrate emacs into more of my day-to-day text and copyediting workflow. I use markdown-mode, and also use whitespace-mode to highlight spaces and carriage returns. In my job I have to do a lot of editing of documents that have been converted from different formats (PDF, doc, docx, HTML e-mail) and there are frequently extra line breaks and double spaces I have to remove, or footnote formatting that has to be changed. Cleaning these things up in emacs is much quicker than doing so in SublimeText, I am discovering…
Posted by Brad91
Dec 12, 2015 at 03:40 PM
For those new to Emacs, there are various “starter” kits available. These help with
the initial set up and some configuration advantages. I use the configuration
created by Steve Purcell at https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d.
Other starter kits are list at http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Dec 12, 2015 at 08:24 PM
Brad91 wrote:
For those new to Emacs, there are various “starter” kits available.
>These help with
>the initial set up and some configuration advantages. I use the
>configuration
>created by Steve Purcell at https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d.
>Other starter kits are list at
>http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html
>
>
I feel like these starter kits just introduce more confusion.
Most useful thing I found (for Windows) was this installer: http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/windows/
It basically takes care of the most annoying things I encountered on my first attempts with Emacs—does a proper install, sets the Home directory, creates a directory for dumping plugins and installs Aspell (though, I think Hunspell is better and likely already installed, since it’s the spellchecker for both Firefox and Libre/OpenOffice.)
It claims to include Markdown mode but I could not get it to work without installing it manually, which was no big deal. Just something to note.