Sacha Chua

I think there's a lot to learn from starting from scratch, and it's something I hope to do too.

Gladly! I'll keep the list to what I've studied so far. Here goes:
- If you ever want to explore, say, Doom (Spacemacs is likely too bloated for someone who gravitates to a vanilla config), chemacs[1] is a nifty, simple profile switcher
- I think there's a lot of value in studying what they've done with their mnemonic keybinding systems (I love being able to narrow to an org-mode subtree and widen again with =, n= and =, N=, respectively, as but one of many examples)
- Sasha Chua is a good source, as she's very knowledgeable and put out a drawn 1-pager[2] on starting Emacs - it's geared towards standard Emacs keybindings
- Personally, I'm a huge fan of Evil-mode for Vim keybindings, as they're powerful and portable and I had basic familiarity with Vim before picking up Emacs
- I haven't found a rough edge in Evil-mode yet - it seems very refined
- Dired is worth getting a handle on early since any improvement in how you can navigate Emacs translates
- Magit is pure magic, and I now have my full ~/org under version control with what feels like near-0 overhead
- Seorenn makes mostly Spacemacs videos[3] and Zaiste Programming makes Doom videos[4], but I find them useful regardless of my config - you may just want to skip to the videos on packages that interest you
- If you haven't yet, choosing either Helm or Ivy is huge
- Personally, I'm happy with helm in Spacemacs and I was…

This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems (http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracker-visualizing-time-spent-with-ruby-and-r/ and http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-on-new-features/).

A bunch of the things he noted resonate with me, like noting the difference between time spent in the office, and time spent actually working (even when you are not procrastinating, there's all kinds of little things taking your time). I've not been as rigorous about setting goals and then sticking to them, but I did set up a "traffic light" system, aiming to hit 4 hours work on my PhD every day ( a typical "long-term" goal which easily gets buried under short-term commitments and things you can "cross off a list").

I also have data that can let me show how long I work on things on average, at what time of the day etc, but I haven't dug into it yet... I see some great posts about quantified self people (like Sacha Chua http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/07/quantified-awesome-adding-calendar-heatmaps-to-categories/), but either they tend to use totally off-the-shelf programs like RescueTime, or they tend to write their own solutions... I'd love for the QS community to come up with some standards, for example a standard way of…

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html gets posted almost every time there's an org-mode front-page link, and there's good reason for that. I've been working in org-mode since 2006-2007, and it's still the most complete, single-page view integration I've seen of the project into someone's life. Sacha Chau (http://sachachua.com/blog/) is also a fantastic resource for information on org-mode, just a bit more spread out across years of posts.

So, yeah, with 10 years of org-mode experience behind me, I still don't feel like it's smooth yet. I never got the hang of clocking. The lack of stable integrations to the outside world are what kill me. Yes, there's been mobile apps from mobileorg to orgzly to new ones I don't know about, but none have ever really nailed the interface. Calendar syncing is iffy, and breaks often. I still use org-mode for notes, blogs, writing, etc, and my emacs config is org-babel'd, which is a fantastic literate programming environment. I'm even working on a small package to export org-mode to gitbook format (http://github.com/qdot/org-gitbook, don't get your hopes up yet as right now it's just 2 small functions, but it does work). org-trello integration (https://org-trello.github.io/) is getting me closer to what I want, but that still means bouncing org -> trello -> other services, which isn't exactly ergonomic.

I would love if org-mode could be my full memex implementation, but there's parts that just aren't there quite yet. Since part of the package is…

So there ought to be a new generation of leadership in the Emacs maintainer community. Ironically, he is a Haskeller. I thought this was covered on HN before, because people were enthusiastic or concerned depending on how you look at it.

http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-john-wiegley-maintaining-emacs-can-help/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udNb4E4smbM

To the consternation of many, I love Emacs. I even eschewed tmux for multi-term, trying to move to notmuch.el for Gmail-esque email, and even consider moving away from a dedicated PDF reader and consider doc-mode if not for its lagginess (it is doing impressive stuff).

But how do I contribute to Emacs?

I like the Old Guard, I do, but I think there is something to be said for a few orgs philosophy, not implementation, such as Fedora, Mozilla, and their attempts to onboard volunteer effort.

They have good wiki material, they have the badge process to show hip ways to contribute. I too find the latter kind of off-putting, but my point is they try to signal to novices like me what to do and what of those things can be valued and by whom. I recently set up an account with Fedora and will try to work on the project not because I particularly fond of the distro (I prefer Debian, which I also want to start pitching in on), but as a culture I want to understand them and leverage their community handling tactics and use it later. They seem to know something, I want to know how they got there, why, and…

Here[0] is a demonstration of a good set-up in org-mode. This was written in org-mode and generated the html file. You can tangle the source code[1] and try it. This had greatly helped me to get started in organizing everything.

One of the feature I like is time clocking[2] where in you time all everything that you do (including sleep![3]) and eventually review after a week/month/year, you can generate some analysis on what task took most of your time.

org-drill[4] helped me a lot when there are things that I need to memorize.

I used vim for one year before moving to emacs. Indeed, I can edit files faster in vim rather than emacs but I can get more stuffs than in emacs rather than vim because of org-mode. Therefore, I choose emacs for the reason that org-mode helps me organize everything.

[0] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

[1] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.org

[2] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking

[3] http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/11/weekly-review-week-ending-november-20-2015/

> As a non-emacs, non-lisp users, is this really worth trying to learn?

I've been using org for about 2 years to take notes... I've taken several hundred pages worth of notes using it by now. I've been using it for about a month as my task / appointment manager, and I'm impressed by its flexibility.

I was in the same spot when I started because there's a lot of things that Org is capable of. I used the following resources when I was learning Org. You might find them helpful:

1. Carsten Dominick (lead dev of Org-Mode) talks about Org at Google: http://orgmode.org/talks/index.html#sec-1

2. "Power users describe their setup" section on the worg tutorial list: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/index.html

By this point, you'll have atleast some idea about how org can be used. If you decide to delve in further:

3. Sacha Chua's blog posts on Org-Mode: http://sachachua.com/blog/

4. Org compact guide: http://orgmode.org/guide/index.html