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Many people use Emacs just so they can use org-mode. If you're one of them,
welcome!
This is a short introduction to get an overview of what org-mode does.
Org-mode is hard to understand because there are broadly three different things
that org-mode does. They're related but distinct enough to make things
confusing. We'll focus on three different use cases for org-mode:
- org-mode as markup
- org-mode as a task tracker
- org-mode as a computational notebook
Org-mode as markup
==================
Org-mode is first and foremost a lightweight markup language, just like
Markdown. (In fact, they were developed at around the same time.) There are a
few differences in syntax, but if you're already familiar with the ideas behind
Markdown you should be just fine.
If you've never worked with something like Markdown before, you can think of it
as a system of special characters that indicate some formatting, e.g. you mark
text as being *bold*, _underlined_, or /italicized/ by surrounding it with
asterisks, underscores, and slashes respectively.
Once you've authored a file with org-mode, you can use Emacs to export the
org-mode into another format, like HTML, Markdown, ODT, or PDF with LaTeX. Run
`org-export` to bring up the export menu.
Org-mode as a task tracker
==========================
Like Markdown, org-mode has headings. Instead of starting headings with one or
more "#" signs, org-mode uses asterisks. An org mode heading looks like this:
* Heading
Lorem ipsum…
** Subheading
Dolor sit amet…
** Another subheading
Magister Ludi…
* Another top-level heading
Quam elivit…
*Any* heading can become a task. This might feel overwhelming, and rightly so.
For now, just start with a list of top-level headings with the TODO keyword.
* TODO Do important thing
* TODO Take Yessica to get her haircut
* TODO Finish configuring Emacs
You can associate deadlines, notes, tags, attachments, different TODO states,
etc. to these headlines. Read the org-mode manual for more information.
While there are cases when you might want to put a TODO item in an arbitrary
file, most of the time these TODOs will go into an agenda file.
The `org-directory` and `org-agenda-files` variables control where org-mode
looks to find TODO items to generate what's called an agenda: an agenda is a
view of all your headlines with TODO (or other states like WAITING, as
configured) status set. The agenda usually organizes these by date and makes it
easy for you to sort, filter, and modify these items.
For now, just start with one org-mode file at `~/Documents/org/inbox.org`. Put
some headings with TODO keywords in that file and save it. Be sure to add a
deadline for today. (You can run `org-deadline` to do this automatically for
you.) Now invoke `org-agenda`. This should pull up a buffer with those headlines
you just added in it.
There are too many ways you can configure this for me to describe here. Just
start small: have one or two files in the `org-agenda-files` list to act as
where you put your TODO items. Use the agenda to view and modify those TODOs.
Org-mode as a computational notebook
====================================
You can use org-mode as a kind of computational notebook. Org-mode lets you have
blocks of source code in line, and then you can instruct org-mode to evaluate
those blocks of code for you.
The setup varies from language to language, and I'm not going to try to explain
that here. If you're writing code, you should be familiar with reading
documentation, so I'll let you do that yourself. :)
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