[Emacs-orgmode] org-mode workflow
Hello! I'm in the middle of actually getting my act together, and while I have been using org on and off for several months I have not yet fully integrated it into my day-to-day work. I'd like to begin using org for keeping track of my notes and my tasks. As I set out to establish my org files, I find that I'm not sure how to proceed most effectively. I understand, of course, that the answers to these questions will vary from person to person, and that I will undoubtedly find a very specific configuration that fits me best. Still, if you're willing, will you share your thoughts on the following topics? 1) Do you find it to be more convenient to have one file per topic (research.org, personal.org, etc), or one directory per topic with more specific files within it (research/project1.org, personal/finances.org)? 2) Within an org file, do you find it more effective to maintain one tree for tasks and other trees for notes, or do you mix notes and tasks within the same trees? 3) If you use remember with org, what role does it play in your work flow? When do you find yourself reaching for a remember note instead of using an org link or editing an org file directly? 4) Does anyone use timeclock.el with org? Have you found other ways to track time allocation using built-in org functions? 5) What's the one trick you're most pleased to have discovered, or the one feature that changed your routine most once you began to use it? If you feel that this discussion is not appropriate for the list, please feel free to email me off-list at this address. Thanks for any help, /au ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] org-mode workflow
On Apr 10, 2006, at 9:00, Austin Frank wrote: If you feel that this discussion is not appropriate for the list, please feel free to email me off-list at this address. I would definitely like to see this discussion here on the list - in fact it was one of the main reasons for creating this list. I have been getting questions in this direction repeatedly. - Carsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] org-mode workflow
Hi all Thanks Austin for starting this discussion. I've been wanting to start a discussion on use cases for org-mode for quite some time. On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 03:00 -0400, Austin Frank wrote: > 1) Do you find it to be more convenient to have one file per topic > (research.org, personal.org, etc), or one directory per topic with more > specific files within it (research/project1.org, personal/finances.org)? So far I've been using one file per topic. > 2) Within an org file, do you find it more effective to maintain one > tree for tasks and other trees for notes, or do you mix notes and tasks > within the same trees? I mix notes and tasks. > 3) If you use remember with org, what role does it play in your work > flow? When do you find yourself reaching for a remember note instead of > using an org link or editing an org file directly? I have not used remember so far. > 5) What's the one trick you're most pleased to have discovered, or the > one feature that changed your routine most once you began to use it? I always start the day with opening my agenda-list to see what I have planned to do today. I use the week view so I can see at a glance how busy the rest of the week is. -- Christian Egli, Senior Consultant Novell (Schweiz) AG, Leutschenbachstrasse 41, 8050 Zürich Tel. +41 43 299 75 46 direct, Tel. +41 43 299 78 00, Fax: +41 43 299 75 01 ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
[Emacs-orgmode] Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
Hi all I live in Org-Agenda Week mode. This is where I look at my tasks for today and for the rest of the week. So the typical use case for me is that I take notes for a certain project, let's say I have in my desktop-project.org * Desktop Training ** Call Trainer clarify the content of the training ** Setup training room ** prepare desktop machines ** Training is on April 18th As you can see I mix notes and tasks. Ok, now the first three are tasks so I C-c C-t on them which changes desktop-project.org as follows: * Desktop Training ** TODO Call Trainer clarify the content of the training ** TODO Setup training room ** TODO prepare desktop machines ** Training is on April 18th I know that the training is on the 18th so I need to do the tasks this week, so I schedule them for sometime this week, so I do a couple of C-c C-s. Note that I do not use DEADLINE, as I schedule the tasks so that they will be done before the deadline. If I now look at my Org-Agenda I see the following: ALL CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS: desktop-project:TODO Call Trainer desktop-project:TODO Setup training room desktop-project:TODO prepare desktop machines work: TODO Write Article Monday10 April 2006 desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO Call Trainer Tuesday 11 April 2006 desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO prepare desktop machines work:Scheduled: TODO Write Article Wednesday 12 April 2006 desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO Setup training room Thursday 13 April 2006 Friday14 April 2006 Saturday 15 April 2006 Sunday16 April 2006 Now in the week overview I can see that I also plan to write an article on Tuesday. This will leave me no time to prepare the desktop machines so I reschedule this task to Wednesday by S-right on the task. As soon as I've called the trainer I press `t' on the "Call Trainer" Task and this marks the task as DONE. So far everything is fine. But there are a couple of questions: 1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use for SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the Org-Agenda Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other people use it for? 2. I would like tasks that are scheduled to no longer show up as "CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS". For me open items are items that have not been scheduled yet and that I need to schedule. 3. The sorting of items within a day is a mystery to me. I would like to sort them by state (TODO, DONE) and priority. Sorting by priority seems to work for the CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS but not for a specific day. I modified the to '(time-up priority-down), but it still sorts by category for the days. I tried to debug this but did not find my way around the code ((org-finalize-agenda-entries). 4. When doing some mucking around the code should I use org-mode from Emacs CVS or the one from Carstens Website? Thanks -- Christian Egli, Senior Consultant Novell (Schweiz) AG, Leutschenbachstrasse 41, 8050 Zürich Tel. +41 43 299 75 46 direct, Tel. +41 43 299 78 00, Fax: +41 43 299 75 01 ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
On Apr 10, 2006, at 13:21, Christian Egli wrote: 4. When doing some mucking around the code should I use org-mode from Emacs CVS or the one from Carstens Website? For now, only a quick answer to this last point. Please, all comments about code and new ideas relative to what is on my website. For the Emacs CVS code: bug reports only, please. - Carsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
[Emacs-orgmode] Re: org-mode workflow
Austin Frank <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 1) Do you find it to be more convenient to have one file per topic > (research.org, personal.org, etc), or one directory per topic with > more specific files within it (research/project1.org, > personal/finances.org)? I'm having all relevant data (projects, personal, other) in one file and use the archive function to clean up the main file. Some very big files are linked to my main file. > 2) Within an org file, do you find it more effective to maintain one > tree for tasks and other trees for notes, or do you mix notes and > tasks within the same trees? mixed, I like to have everything together for export, printing and so on. > 3) If you use remember with org, what role does it play in your work > flow? When do you find yourself reaching for a remember note instead > of using an org link or editing an org file directly? I don't use remember. > 4) Does anyone use timeclock.el with org? Have you found other ways > to track time allocation using built-in org functions? Not really necessary, because org can calculate time spans and you can easily insert timestamps with times. > 5) What's the one trick you're most pleased to have discovered, or > the one feature that changed your routine most once you began to use > it? Having discovered org-mode in the NEWS section of emacs-22 certainly changed the way I use emacs, thanks Carsten! And of course being able to link everything (including emails, pdfs, tex-files) into one file results in a nice workflow. Thomas ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
[Emacs-orgmode] org-4.20: A few observations
* Observations from using org-4.19d & 4.20
** Problem: table creating with bracket link with font-lock enabled
1) Create a table row with links: OK
|---+--+--|
| P | Location | Date |
|---+--+--|
| | [[http://www.google.com][Google]] | |
2) with cursor at "x" press to go to next row: PROBLEM
|---+--+--|
| P | Location | Date |
|---+--+--|
| | [[http://www.google.com][Google]] | x|
| | | |
3) alignment problem persists as row are added
|---+--+--|
| P | Location | Date |
|---+--+--|
| | [[http://www.google.com][Google]] | x|
| | | |
| | | |
4) Moving cursor outside table and returning then typing does
not resolve the problem.
5) However moving outside table and typing a char, killing line,
etc. then returning and typing fixes alignment
|---+--+--|
| P | Location | Date |
|---+--+--|
| | [[http://www.google.com][Google]] | x|
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
a
6) Alignment after HTML export is correct ;)
** Problem: ispell hangs in org buffers with bracket links when font lock
is on
N.B. This is probably an old ispell. Can someone running a
newer version confirm this behavior?
ispell-version's value is
"ispell.el 3.4 -- Fri Aug 4 09:41:50 PDT 2000"
** Problem: Strange edit behavior with links
*** Kill-line behavior depends on font lock state with links in column 0
Consider the following pair of links with the cursor on the
blank line between them, executing kill-line
kills next two lines when font lock mode is on but only one line when
font lock mode is off.
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
*** Not a problem for links in column >1
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
[[http://www.google.com][Google]]
** Observation: TODO sequences and dynamic setting of org-todo-keywords
I'm uncertain if this is expected or a bug, but the sequence outlined
below causes problems. I've empirically determined that the problems
can be avoided by:
1) M-x normal-mode after the setq.
2) Setting the org-todo-keywords in .emacs rather than via eval-region
3) Killing this buffer opening it again after setq
(effectively same as #2)
Can anyone explain the rationale behind #1: calling normal-mode?
If so, this may be something to put in the info files. I am also
aware that normal-mode is required after updating HTML style
specifications. However, it may be pleasing for newbies to understand the
reason. C-h f normal-mode isn't particularly illuminating in this regard.
*** Setup workflow described in info docs
(setq org-todo-keywords '("TODO" "FEEDBACK" "VERIFY" "DONE")
org-todo-interpretation 'sequence)
Mark above region and M-x eval-region
*** Verify variables
C-h v org-todo-keywords
org-todo-keywords's value is
("TODO" "FEEDBACK" "VERIFY" "DONE")
C-h v org-todo-interpretation
org-todo-interpretation's value is sequence
*** Create a TODO item
TODO This is a test
*** Try cycling with C-c C-t
FEEDBACK This is a test
*** Again: Try cycling with C-c C-t
TODO FEEDBACK This is a test
*** One more time: Try cycling with C-c C-t
FEEDBACK FEEDBACK This is a test
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Re: [Emacs-orgmode] shell links [was: Version 4.19c]
Carsten Dominik (04/06/2006 12:28 PM) wrote: scotto: 3.) If I put the cursor in the link and type C-c C-l, then the minibuffer says: Link: shell:ls%20*.org If I cancel (C-g), C-c C-o still works. carsten: In the hidden part of a link, space and brackets are escaped. I forgot to unescape for the editing prompt. In 4.20, the minibuffer is now showing the space without the '%20', a nice touch. However, the %20 still does show up in the link text when I delete the leftmost ']'. It's just a display issue, though, because the shell link works fine. ... Also, maybe you'd like to know that there is a variable to turn off the safety query in shell links: org-confirm-shell-links. I could also change the yes-or-no query to a y-or-n query to make it easier to answer We'll see, not now. I tried it out the customization and much prefer the y/n confirmation. Thanks. Scott ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
Christian Egli wrote: > 1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use > for SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the > Org-Agenda Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other > people use it for? Hello! In my previous thread I noted that I want to use org to manage notes and tasks. This left out an important aspect of the way I have used org and intend to, one of things that actually pushed me toward the system in the first place. I also need to track how I'm spending time on my tasks. I recently lost ~20 lbs, and the most important tool for affecting that change was writing down my weight every day and kept a running average (I used the system described in the Hacker's Diet). Just seeing the trend was enough to keep me motivated to eat a little bit less each day, or find a small extra opportunity to be active. As a graduate student I'm not required to do much in the way of accounting for how I use my time, as long as certain long-term milestones are met. This can make it difficult to stay on task during shorter stretches. Even breaking large tasks into small ones and documenting my progress on them can sometimes lead to a lot of small tasks being put off just as long as the large one would have been. So, just like for weight loss, I want to start keeping a record of my daily time use. Hopefully, once I have enough data to aggregate and look at the trends, I'll be able to pinpoint areas where I can improve and will be able to motivate myself to stay on task longer or return to my tasks more quickly after distractions. A guide for beginning grad students in the computer science department at my university suggests keeping a log file where you record your accomplishments at 15 minute intervals on days when you're having trouble being productive. I've tried this, using an external timer and marking an org file with a time stamp for each entry. I found the method to be both too frequent and too removed from my current task to be especially useful. My intention is to keep an org file (per day? per week? per month?) where I track my work using timestamp ranges and links. When I start on a task I'll make a time stamp and link to a resource relevant to the task (the file I'm editing, the article I'm reading, notes from the class I'm going to). When I finish a task or change tasks, I'll mark the end of the time range I spent on that task (and begin a new one if necessary). In some cases I'll record notes with the entry about what happened while I worked, to try to pin down things that are especially effective or especially distracting. I do think there's something to the notion of making regular progress reports while you work during stretches where it's hard to stay on task. In a case where I was following this strategy, I would still start an entry with a time range and a link to my current work, but I might include sub-entries marked with timestamps to allow me to keep finer-grained records of my progress. I intend to write a nag-me elisp function that prompts for a new entry after a certain amount of time has elapsed-- hopefully with programmable prompt intervals. I have a hunch that an exponential function describing the interval between prompts might be effective: record often early in the task to get myself honed in, but record less often as time passes and I become more involved with the work. I believe that tagging these progress entries with a series of categorical tags will allow me to aggregate across similar tasks and do some analysis of how much time I'm spending on different tasks. I'd like to be able to ask questions like "How much time did I spend last week on project X?", "How much time did I spend last week on all research projects?", and "How much time did I spend last week working productively?". I'm hopeful that the org/tables/calc combination will serve me well in pursuing this. Hope that gives you some ideas about some potential uses of timestamps and time ranges. I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I've described here, whether people are using similar systems or have different approaches to the same kind of issue. Thanks, /au ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
[Emacs-orgmode] Shoting yourself in the foot with shell links
We had some discussion here about shell links, and some people might be wondering why there is a confirmation prompt for shell links at all. Here is why: Consider a link [[shell:rm -rf ~/*][Google Search]] This link would look like "Google Search" in an Org-mode buffer, but when you activate it, it would remove your home directory. So there is a very good reason to prompt for confirmation, and fully removing the confirmation is a rather bad idea. - Carsten -- Carsten Dominik Sterrenkundig Instituut "Anton Pannekoek" Universiteit van Amsterdam Kruislaan 403 NL-1098SJ Amsterdam phone: +31 20 525 7477 ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
[Emacs-orgmode] org-mode workflow
From: Austin Frank <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1) Do you find it to be more convenient to have one file per topic (research.org, personal.org, etc), or one directory per topic with more specific files within it (research/project1.org, personal/finances.org)? Separate directories. I've only used org-mode for a couple of weeks so maybe I'll change my mind. But so far, separate directories have worked best, partly because I have everything else organized in directories, and partly because some of my outlines are documentation that I check into CVS -- my colleagues probably don't care about next week's dinner plans. However, I sometimes use agenda mode to tie the dates and TODO's in all of my orgfiles into a single view. 2) Within an org file, do you find it more effective to maintain one tree for tasks and other trees for notes, or do you mix notes and tasks within the same trees? I keep them together. For me, the fact that they're all in the same spot is one of the biggest org-mode selling points -- when I'm using org-mode to think, the TODO's and dates occur to me at the same time as the logical content; it's nice to just put them right there and move on with a minimum of fuss. Having a pure TODO list or a calendar is useful, though: For me, an agenda view or a sparse tree does the job. 3) If you use remember with org, what role does it play in your work flow? When do you find yourself reaching for a remember note instead of using an org link or editing an org file directly? I use it to mark places in source code or documentation. For example, when I need to change unfamiliar code, I'll read through it, hitting "C-c l" whenever I see an important function, variable declaration, bug, whatever. Then, before I change anything, I organize all those remembered locations into an outline with "C-C C-l". Having them all in one place helps me to think about the big picture of the changes I'm contemplating, especially when I can mix them in with web page links, bibliography references, and TODO's. I also like the fact that, a week later, when I've forgotten everything, I can still retrieve my source code browsing tracks. OK, I'm usually not quite that methodical, but I experimented with this approach on one difficult problem, and I found it worthwhile. This brings to mind a couple of things I'd really like to see in org mode: 1.) a special link type for latex bibfile references. Maybe clicking on the link could pop up a paper's author and title, with another RETURN key hit bringing you to the full reference in the bib file. Something like that... 2.) a way to link to emails in Thunderbird's IMAP cache. This is probably so hard that it is science fiction. 4) Does anyone use timeclock.el with org? Have you found other ways to track time allocation using built-in org functions? Nope. 5) What's the one trick you're most pleased to have discovered, or the one feature that changed your routine most once you began to use it? Before I started using orgmode, I was already making occasional plain text outlines, but as they rapidly expanded, they became too unwieldy. It was always possible to search them, of course, but the search results were still overwhelming -- it was too hard to see at a glance how one thing fit in relation to another. Org-mode's fast outline collapsing and moving commands made outlines much easier, both to understand and to edit (which for me is part of understanding). Scott ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] org-4.20: A few observations
Hi Eric, thanks for your report and careful observations. * Observations from using org-4.19d & 4.20 ** Problem: table creating with bracket link with font-lock enabled [...] 1) Create a table row with links: OK 2) with cursor at "x" press to go to next row: PROBLEM 3) alignment problem persists as row are added 4) Moving cursor outside table and returning then typing does not resolve the problem. 5) However moving outside table and typing a char, killing line, etc. then returning and typing fixes alignment First of all, if anything goes wrong with table realignment, you can always force a realign of the table with C-c C-c which in Org-mode generally has the meaning of "update" (exception: tags). The org-mode table editor works by re-aligning the table each time you press TAB or RET in a table. When the tables get large, this constant re-aligning does get kind of slow, so the table editor tries to be really smart and do the re-alignment only if necessary. For example, it inserts and deletes characters in table fields, and if the column width is not affected, it does not trigger a re-align. And it also tries to re-insert new rows without triggering a re-align. This has worked really well so far, but indeed with hiding of link text the code inserting a new row without triggering re-align is broken. For now I will fix it by triggering a re-align whenever a new line is inserted. When I get around to it I will fix the insertion code (which is a bit more complicated. The reason why leaving the table, doing a buffer modification, getting back into the table and pressing TAB fixes the indentation is precisely because then Org-mode know the buffer has changed and a re-align might be necessary, so it triggers one. 6) Alignment after HTML export is correct ;) Yes, this is fully independent. ** Problem: ispell hangs in org buffers with bracket links when font lock is on N.B. This is probably an old ispell. Can someone running a newer version confirm this behavior? I have tried quickly and not seen a problem with 3.6 - but I did not test exhaustively. ispell-version's value is "ispell.el 3.4 -- Fri Aug 4 09:41:50 PDT 2000" ** Problem: Strange edit behavior with links *** Kill-line behavior depends on font lock state with links in column 0 Consider the following pair of links with the cursor on the blank line between them, executing kill-line kills next two lines when font lock mode is on but only one line when font lock mode is off. [[http://www.google.com][Google]] [[http://www.google.com][Google]] *** Not a problem for links in column >1 [[http://www.google.com][Google]] [[http://www.google.com][Google]] [[http://www.google.com][Google]] [[http://www.google.com][Google]] This is interesting, but right now I don't know how to fix this. Hmmm. I guess this really is an Emacs bug. ** Observation: TODO sequences and dynamic setting of org-todo-keywords When starting Org-mode, a number of regular expressions are computed and set. Among others, there are the regular expressions matching the TODO keywords and other settings. When you change the settings while Emacs is running, these expressions need to be re-computed. M-x normal-mode does simply restart Org-mode and trigger this. For the same money you could do M-x fundamental-mode and then M-x org-mode. The only way to avoid this would be to compute the regular expressions again before each command using them, which I find not acceptable. The best way to experiment with TODO keywords in *not* putting Lisp code into the buffer and eval it with eval-region. It is much better to use #+TYP_TODO: TODO WAITING DONE in the buffer and then press C-c C-c when you have changed one of those lines to update. If so, this may be something to put in the info files. I am also aware that normal-mode is required after updating HTML style specifications. I don't think this is true, is it? Which specifications? However, it may be pleasing for newbies to understand the reason. C-h f normal-mode isn't particularly illuminating in this regard. I have tried to explain this well in the documents, but I guess it can be improved. Yes I am not saying much about the "why", but you are the first to care :-) I'll take another look at the documentation and see if this can be improved. - Carsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Emacs-orgmode] org-4.20: A few observations
On Apr 10, 2006, at 19:00, Eric J Haywiser wrote: ** Problem: Strange edit behavior with links *** Kill-line behavior depends on font lock state with links in column 0 Consider the following pair of links with the cursor on the blank line between them, executing kill-line kills next two lines when font lock mode is on but only one line when font lock mode is off. [[http://www.google.com][Google]] [[http://www.google.com][Google]] Actually, this one I cannot reproduce. Anyone? - Carsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
