My Emacs journey

This is a follow up to my "Master your tools" post. As an example of one of my tools, I talk about my Emacs use.

I have been using Emacs for the last 20 years. At this point, I don't even know Emacs, my fingers do. If you ask me the shortcut for something, I will need to let my fingers do it and try to observe what they are doing. And sometimes ---as in the story of the caterpillar who forgets how to walk when asked to demonstrate it--- I forget about how to do something when I try to attempt it consciously.

Four stages of competence:

4. Unconscious Competence (Right Intuition)
3. Conscious Competence (Right Analysis)
2. Conscious Incompetence (Wrong Analysis)
1. Unconscious Incompetence (Wrong Intuition)https://t.co/peAEUtkMZV pic.twitter.com/OxZ3WqreVa

— Colby Serpa💡 (@ColbySerpa) November 6, 2018 

From text-editing to text-wrangling

I have been learning Emacs at a glacial pace, but I think that worked for me better. I figured I can internalize so much at a time, so I didn't rush things. I initially used Emacs mostly for power editing LaTeX files.

It was only around 2008 that I started with the Emacs org-mode. I loved its outlining feature, and started using and customizing it ever since. It has been a big part of my thinking and writing process for the last 10 years. You can say that it became my out-of-core memory execution primitive.

When I write a blog post or an article, I use the org-mode outline headers to organize/departmentalize and text-wrangle the content. I have a JUNK header where I move extra text, this helps me overcome my kill-your-darlings syndrome. I have an INSERT header for noting down what I like to insert. I visit these later to decide what is the best place in the article to insert them, or whether I should move them to the junk header.

So this does work like my out-of-core memory module. At any time I only keep a small number of things in my mind, and use the headers as my swap memory. I go forward with one decision/issue at a time without overwhelming myself. This is how I try to scale my attention in my offline thinking mode. I don't have a large working memory (I also suspect you don't either) and this helps immensely. Text wrangling for the win!

Getting things done with org-mode

As for using org-mode (org-agenda) for TODO lists and getting things done, I had gone through 3 unsuccessful attempts before I finally made it to stick. After my failed attempts, I thought I am hopelessly disorganized and this is too much of a hassle. After I saw my colleague Jason use it regularly, I gave it another shot. Incorporating org-agenda to my workflow did wonders for my peace-of-mind, if not for my organization and timeliness. I wrote about this a little here.

Before integrating the emacs org-agenda to my life, I always had open loop tasks that caused me worries, and eating up cycles in my brain: "Oh, I should remember doing this", "Woe to me, I am procrastinating on this", etc. After successfully adopting emacs org-mode as my to-do list and agenda manager (which, took a couple years, and several aborted tries), the benefit I got out was the clarity of mind, and the release of all that background anxiety.

Other assorted Emacs tricks I use

I love the org-export-to-latex functionality of org-mode. This way I can get a pdf file shareable with others anytime, while still staying in org-mode where I do my thinking. In my org-file I would have COMMENTed out the JUNK header, INSERT header, and the META header (for questions/connections) to capture my thinking and provide a snapshot of my brain. The exported LaTeX article hides all of those, but I still need those as my documentation of my thought process and to evolve my work further. Frankly I don't get how Word/Pages/etc users deal with not having COMMENT sections in their documents.

I also use the org-export-to-beamer mode for quickly preparing presentations in Beamer. This helped me survive teaching. Preparing powerpoint presentations takes a lot of time and is painful. On the other hand, due to its integration to my thinking/writing process and due to the COMMENTing/evolving benefits I mentioned above, exporting the org document to Beamer makes things easy/frictionless for me.

Another hack I use is to maintain a notes.org file in any folder to keep track of that project. I use this as a lab-notebook to record everything about the project, and meta-thoughts, concerns, etc. I also add timestamps to my entries with my Emacs shortcut (Wed, 14 Nov 18 - - - 21:07) cntrl-c-t. Of course I had to try this with my fingers first to learn the command I use.

I use M-x-tomatinho for keeping track of my pomodoros in Emacs. It is visual, and it gives me a good picture of how my day is going. In my self.org file, I keep an org-mode table where I note which pomodoro number corresponds to what time and task. This gives me a candid picture of how my day is going and how my week has gone. This post from 3 years ago describes the pomodoro workflow I had then, which is obsolete now.

When I am working on large documents in org-mode, I use hot links (radio-targets) for  definitions, so that when I write the word at a later point in the file, Emacs automatically inserts the link to where it is defined first.

I also use predefined hi-lock for "!!" and "??" to easily highlight some interesting findings  and questions in the text. And I sometimes use impromptu M-x highlight-phrase or M-x highlight-regexp to highlight other things.

I use <f3> and <f4> to define and use keyboard macros for ad hoc custom editing needs.

I wrote a bit about how I prepare my Emacs setup here.

MAD questions

1. What should my Emacs learning/mastering pace be?
I don't consider myself a power Emacs user. I am far from it. I don't go shortcut crazy. I don't try to automate everything. And if some new Emacs tricks/shortkeys don't stick with me, I take it that I don't really need them. As a counterpoint to this though, I couldn't get the org-agenda to stick for a long time, and now that I use it I realize how much I needed it. So where should I draw the line about how much to push to learn/adopt new things?

2. Benefits of drawing/sketching versus typing
As much as I love Emacs, it is linear and text. Although org-mode helps for making things non-linear with its headers, it doesn't give the same visual thinking benefits from drawing/sketching. I think I will try to incorporate more doodling/sketching drawing to my workflow in the coming months. Let me know if you have good suggestions for this.