I watched the Org-Mode Google Tech Talk video recently. It helped me
to understand more of what Org-Mode was about. I thought I'd share
some likes and dislikes concerning Org-Mode.
Like:
- Different agenda views. Very nicely done.
- Folding the entire structure of the document to make a "Table of
Contents" of sorts.
- Colorized "TODO"/"DONE"/"WAITING" keywords.
- Generating an HTML table from an Org table that is embedded in a
comment.
- Auto-realigning tables after hitting TAB.
Dislike:
- Meta+(left arrow, right arrow) key bindings. I use this all the
time for navigating around documents in modes other than Org, and
it annoys me that Org mode uses this to manipulate heading levels.
This is easy enough to work around, with a few well-placed
define-key statements.
- Focus on tables. Now that I'm out of college, I have no use for
tabular data. Then again, the
taylor + Calc example in the video
was amazing.
Open questions:
- How does Org Mode deal with some text at the left margin which
follows a heading? Does it get folded with the heading? I don't
want to have to indent text just to get it folded.
Blog - /Tech
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Posted by Damien Cassou at Mon Jul 21 12:27:08 2008
Unindented text is part of the previous node. It's a place dedicated to put comments.Posted by piyo at Mon Jul 21 19:07:18 2008
Thanks for the text review. I can't seem to start watching this video.Text at the left margin will be folded into its parent header, if any. With the default org-mode settings, your file may have lots of headers and comments, but it won't be shown until you start drilling down with the tab key. It is not necessary to indent comment text to get it folded.
I am a recent org-mode user. I find the table modes to be magical and frustrating at the same time. I can sort the columns. I can extract to TSV. I can hide text as long as it does not contain Japanese. But how do I sum a column into a parent header? Okay I know you can do it with "mark region", M-x org-table-sum, M-x yank, but I want to do it the spreadsheet like way, auto-magically.
Posted by cd at Tue Jul 22 10:36:18 2008
You say that you are using M-cursor keys for navigating. With a special package or just forward/backward word? Because these are on C-cursor as well.- Carsten
Posted by Michael Olson at Wed Jul 23 00:44:28 2008
Hi Carsten,Just forward/backward word. It's true that they are also on C-cursor, but that is harder for me to type: left thumb (Meta) compared with left pinky (Control).
Posted by cd at Wed Jul 23 01:35:10 2008
Hi Mike,ok, I can understand that. I am curious: what replacement keys are you using for structure editing?
- Carsten
P.S. Hope it is ok to use the comments regions for this "dialog"?
Posted by Michael Olson at Wed Jul 23 11:17:30 2008
Currently I don't use structure editing at all -- I just add another asterisk whenever I want to change the level of a heading and leave the headings on the left margin rather than indenting them. Muse uses C-< and C-> to decrease/increase list indentation; it might be nice to see those used for structure indentation in Org.Yeah, it's OK to dialog here :^) .
Posted by cd at Wed Jul 23 17:29:57 2008
Hmm, these make good keys except that you still need something to make the difference between demoting a headline and demoting a subtree.M-S-cursor will do whole subtrees, M-cursor only the current entry. But for you, binding them to org-shiftmetaright and org-shiftmetaleft might be the right thing, it would then also work in tables to move columns (but you don't use tables....), and in plain lists.
There is no need to indent any headlines or text below them. All headlines do start at the left margin, the "indentation" shown in the video is only an optical illusion that you can get by putting
# STARTUP: hidestars
into the buffer and restarting org-mode for that buffer.
Text below a headline will be not afected at all by promoting and demoting the headline above it if at least one line has no indentation at all. If all lines are indented, Org assumes that you want to indent the text along with the number of stars of a headline and then shift stuff around accordingly.
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