I’ve been a vi guy since I first touched Linux in ‘91. Every few years, some bit of news or tip I run across causes me to load Emacs and attempt to wear out my fingers finding the right sets of sequences to do something that comes naturally to me with vi. The visit to Emacs tends to be short-lived and I return to the land of the home-keys.

Recently, I’ve been concerned with keeping better track of discoveries and activities. I currently use a mix of tools, most of which depend on a third-party to maintain a web-service. For instance, tasks are dumped into Toodledo and my research goes straight to Evernote. These are both fantastic tools I plan to continue to leverage but they don’t fulfill a need I can’t quite define. Essentially I want a way to take notes, highlight tasks with their contexts both within real space and within their relevant documents, and be in a form I wouldn’t mind sharing with others. Arguably there are a number of cloud tools that nearly do this, in fact either of the two mentioned above almost achieve this. However, I want something very cross-platform and also with me in the absence of any cloud.

Fortunately, Carsten Dominik and numerous others apparently have had similar needs and have developed Org-mode. Org-mode is a mode within Emacs that I couldn’t begin to outline in a post. Countless others already have and many are linked at the official site. I just want to set a trap for anyone that might be stumbling across this site by mentioning a tool that has been known to cause people to switch editors. I am simply amazed by the amount of thought and design put into the art of editing plain-text hierarchical documents. I’m fairly certain my visit to Emacs this go around will last much longer. Although, I may need to look into a more appropriate keyboard.