Last night's talk.

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 03/ 9/11 03:54 PM, Colin McGregor wrote:
>> Just a quick public thank you to Sacha Chua for her talk on org-mode.
>>
>> For those of you running Debian (or some of the Debian based Linux
>> distributions such as Ubuntu) adding emacs and org-mode can be as
>> simple as typing :
>>
>> apt-get install emacs org-mode
>>
>> Getting emacs and org-mode to do some of the tricks demonstrated last
>> evening ... well, that is the next challenge :-) .
>>
>> Anyway, another thanks.
>
> I've got mine basically working (learned about TAB so far) per the
> instructions here: http://orgmode.org/guide/Activation.html#Activation
>
> If your Emacs doesn't ship with orgmode, the install seems pretty
> straightforward: http://orgmode.org/guide/Installation.html#Installation

FYI, I found what was missing last night regarding the "templates"
thing...  Sasha was adding new entries which would get templated
(based on pre-specified template, so that one might record "notes",
"new books," and probably other stuff).  This requires an extra line
of config, as org-mode does not automatically include org-capture.

For similar beginnings, the following 3 lines do the trick fairly well:
  (require 'org-capture)
  (setq org-default-notes-file (concat org-directory "/notes.org"))
  (global-set-key "\C-cc" 'org-capture)

I expect Sasha has something like the following, as well:
(custom-set-variables (org-directory "~/Dropbox/org"))
;;; She mentioned she's using DropBox for her org files...

Presumably she's got some definitions of templates that do things like
capturing timestamps, automatically "typing in" material, and such;
that's not a "day #1" kind of thing :-).

One of the coolest things that I saw is the checkbox functionality.
You type in:

 - [ ] Item 1
 - [ ] Item 2
 - [ ] item 3

And then you can use the typical "magic C-c C-c" on the [ ] to have it
switch the checkbox on and off.  Superb for dealing with checklists.
"I'll bet there's a way" to make it capture timestamps, which would
make this mighty useful for helping manage reports on operational
activities...

"We began maintenance at [whenever I c-c c-c'ed Item 1.  The steps
were completed at... their various times.  The outage ended at... the
timestamp on the last one."

This fits directly with the bit of discussion of "doing GTD using Org
mode."   (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done>)
Someone was wondering if Org mode was made for this; I'm quite sure it
was NOT, but rather, cool extensions have kept getting added in that
makes it pretty easy to implement a GTD system using Org mode.

> Some friends and I were inspired and are giving up vi/nano/foo editors
> for 40 days and using Emacs. So far so good. I'm finding that Tramp is
> especially handy since it means not installing emacs on multiple
> servers. It even has TAB filename completion over ssh.

Tramp's pretty awesome.  I only just barely got into it before a
departmental change that reduced its usefulness to me.

When I was in operations, I'd be logging into wacky sets of places and
editing files whereever, and, for that, Tramp is awesome.  Emacs only
needs to be on my workstation; I can use ssh (or other protocols!) to
get at the files elsewhere.

I daresay that, as well, other solutions have been becoming preferable
to "ssh over there and edit something", between:

a) Edit the cfengine configuration to "do something better," and then
unleash it, so I don't even ever need to ssh over there.

b) Edit the configuration in the [Git|Darcs|Svn|...] repo, check it
in, and watch it get checked back out elsewhere.

Those represent a shift from "do stuff" to "impose policy," which
tends to be a more scalable way to think about administering systems.

Tramp is still mighty cool :-).
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