Emacs | renatocandido.org

Organizing with Emacs Org-Mode

Another interesting Emacs mode is Org-Mode. It permits to make annotations and manage to-do lists and projects using text files with some special marks.

The marks as interpreted by Emacs, so that it separates the various parts of the text, which facilitates obtaining information. It is possible to organize an agenda with appointments set up on specific dates and also tasks without due dates. With every agenda item, it is possible to associate tags, which can be used to filter search results. These features make Org-Mode a good resource for those who use GTD. For those who don’t know GTD, it is worth to take a look. It was proposed by David Allen and is described in the book “Getting things done”. A brief description of the method can be seen on this presentation which was given at Google and on this reference card.

Emacs and AUCTEX to edit LaTeX documents

Some years ago, one of the problems I had when I was migrating my desktop to GNU/Linux was finding a development environment for LaTeX. For those who don’t know LaTeX, it’s worth checking out. It is a “document preparation system” widely used for producing mathematical and scientific texts due to its high typographic quality.

By the time I was using MS Windows, I used TeXnicCenter to edit LaTeX projects. Despite its limitations, it did its job well done. On GNU/Linux, I initially tried the Kile editor. Although I consider it an excellent editor, I missed a basic feature: spell correction on the fly (those red marks that are shown under the words when they are spelled incorrectly). Perhaps I had this problem because I was trying to use Kile with GNOME as it was originally developed to be used with KDE.