There are a thousand apps for organising your life, calendars, todo lists, note trackers, but the big kahuna, the true Swiss army knife is org-mode. Out of the box, org-mode understands LaTeX and code snippets, todo lists and bookmarks, projects and agendas. Best of all, it comes with a powerful text editor, Emacs! This week, Ben gave us a live demo of org-mode in Emacs

You can get the original org-mode file from here

What is ORG mode?

Text-based way to organise notes, links, code, and more
Time management tool
- TODO lists
- Tasks, projects
Table editor, spreadsheet
Interactive code notebook
Can be exported to LaTeX, markdown, HTML,…

All in Emacs!

Setup Emacs configuration

Reference / summary

The ORG file format

A simple text format like Markdown.

Anything can be edited, fixed easily by hand if needed.
You can start simple, and discover extra features [Try Alt right/left, shift right/left, TAB to collapse/expand]

* Some section
** A subsection
*** Subsection
**** subsubsection
  - list
  - another item
    - sub-items
** Another subsection

Links

Links files, URLs, shell command, elisp, DOI, …

http://www.google.com

<10.5281/zenodo.2530733>

link

LaTeX

Standard LaTeX formulae are recognised and rendered

Inline like this (e^{i\pi} = -1)

[ e^{i\theta} = \cos\left(\theta\right) + i\sin\left(\theta\right) ]

Toggle equation view: C-c C-x C-l

Tables

Start creating a table with “ headings ” then TAB
Alt + arrow keys move columns, rows
Functions can also manipulate cells

| b | a       | c |
|   |         |   |
|   | kjdhfsf |   |

Source code, notebooks

Type “<s TAB” (other shortcuts for Examples, Quotes, …)
Supports many languages
C-c C-c runs the code block

#+BEGIN_SRC python :results output
print("hello")
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: hello

Tables and code blocks

Tables can be used as input and output to code blocks
Provides a way to pass data between languages

#+NAME: cxx-generate
#+BEGIN_SRC C++ :includes <iostream> 
for(int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
  std::cout << i << ", " << i*i*i - 2*i << "\n";
}
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS: cxx-generate
| 0 |  0 |
| 1 | -1 |
| 2 |  4 |
| 3 | 21 |
| 4 | 56 |

#+BEGIN_SRC python :var data=cxx-generate
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
d = np.array(data)
plt.plot(d[:, 0], d[:, 1])
plt.show()
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: None

Task management

Creating tasks in org-mode:

Add “TODO” to the start of a (sub)section (or S-right)
C-c C-d to choose a deadline from calendar
C-c a to see Agenda views

** Project1
*** TODO thing1
   DEADLINE: <2019-02-22 Fri>
*** TODO thing2
    DEADLINE: <2019-02-20 Wed>
** Project2
*** TODO do something
    DEADLINE: <2019-02-27 Wed>
*** TODO send email

More task management

Once tasks are done they can be marked “DONE”
Other states can be customised: NEXT, WAITING, CANCELLED,… S-right to cycle between states, type C-c C-t or just write yourself.

** DONE that thing
   CLOSED: [2019-02-18 Mon 10:28]
   - State "DONE"       from "WAITING"    [2019-02-18 Mon 10:28]
   - State "WAITING"    from "DONE"       [2019-02-18 Mon 10:27] \\
     waiting for X

This can be customised to fit your preferred way of working

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Time management

How much time to you spend on each task?

C-c C-x C-i clock in
C-c C-x C-o clock out
C-c a c Agenda clock view
C-c C-x C-r Insert / update clock table

Presentations!

This presentation is Org mode with org-show

Files can be exported to many other formats: C-c C-e

e.g. LaTeX -> PDF C-c C-e l p

Can be used as alternative to writing raw LaTeX.

Getting ORGanised