Working With Emacs: First Impressions

My first day with Org-mode after two weeks of intense learning. Overall, it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be. I was lucky not to have too much on my plate today, taking care of only four different cases.

Due to Dropbox syncing issues between beorg and WorkMac, I lost time trying to improvise. This was very frustrating because it happened when I was working on an issue, away from WorkMac, and then realized that I do not have the information I need. I am not sure if the problem is with the app or not, Emacs does save fine to Dropbox.

Another conclusion from today: learn how to build a template for Capture. Right now I’m entering headers manually (by typing ** since M-RTN doesn’t seem to work, not sure why) and I can see that this will quickly get out of hand. After all, Capture was made to enter a note quickly, from a template, and then continue to do other things. Templates are based on LISP though, and LISP was what got me stuck this weekend. I should learn from simple examples.

Finally, I should look into properties. Seems like these could be very useful, especially when I want to search later. Things like computer names, clients (end users), the problem category etc could be fantastic. This should be implemented in the templates.

The weird issue of today: I changed the ellipses Org-mode comes with to down arrow, which works fine at home on Linux; on WorkMac, there’s an underline under the arrow down symbol. Not sure why. When I change back from string to default, the ellipses do not have this problem.

Originally published at joshrollinswrites.com on June 12, 2018.