Does anybody have a good Emacs setup they would like to share? I really need to give mine an overhaul, and I’m looking for ideas.
About two weeks ago I implemented Workrave pomodoro timer recommended in a previous rationality diary thread with a 25⁄5 split. This has been a fantastically good decision.
What’s amusing to me is that the pomodoro timer has improved my productivity way out of proportion to what I expected. I’m very prone to investing lots of time and energy into productivity gizmos which ultimately don’t pay off. The Workrave timer is very simple and works immediately. I simply find that it’s very easy to focus for a 25 minute chunk when I know I’m going to take a 5 minute walk shortly.
Additionally, Nozbe (a GTD implementation) continues to be a good investment. I find myself still failing to sufficiently granularize large tasks. Nozbe ends up not really helping much when it comes to taskifying large projects, but helps a lot with remembering to return emails, remembering to buy birthday cards, acting on important thoughts that happen to hit me in the wrong context, and other inherently “small” items.
META: So, this is probably the third rationality diary entry of mine which mentions Nozbe, and I realize this may be annoying or redundant to other people. From my point of view, I think it’s potentially valuable to track how a person uses a tool over time, rather than merely hearing an initial gushing endorsement followed by silence. Do y’all want me to shut up about Nozbe or should I keep providing a record of my experience?
I second wedrifid’s recommendation for evil-mode. (I also use nonstandard bindings ;w ;b ;k for save, switch buffer, kill buffer respectively, and these are a lot faster than the equivalent ex-mode commands would be.) I also use auto-complete-mode just about everywhere; I don’t have semantic completion (it’s on my todo list), but it’s very useful anyway. I like reading camelCase but not typing it, and often I can just type camelca to get camelCase. ido-mode is also a massive win.
On a lower level, binding F5 to compile has been a great improvement for me over my old “move mouse to terminal window, press up-enter” workflow. More recently I got further improvements by rebinding F5 in haxe mode to “find the makefile-equivalent higher in the directory tree, then compile” instead of using “M-x cd” in every buffer.
I haven’t found org-mode as useful as others report. I like its structure, and I’ve written presentations in it; but my emacs start up buffer is an org-mode todo list that I haven’t updated in over a year. This may be a more general problem with myself and todo lists. (I have found that writing them on paper is helpful.)
If you use org-mode, this is what made my emacs experience reach a whole new level (I literally have every aspect of my life in .org files now—I can tell you what I ate for lunch 7 months ago, which isn’t especially useful but really fun to point out).
You don’t seem like an emacs newbie though, so you might have already seen the above. Recently I came across this setup, which has an inspiring organization and some very cool ideas which might be useful to you. This guy also wrote org-drill, an awesome SRS implementation for emacs—it even supports incremental reading!
Does anybody have a good Emacs setup they would like to share? I really need to give mine an overhaul, and I’m looking for ideas.
About two weeks ago I implemented Workrave pomodoro timer recommended in a previous rationality diary thread with a 25⁄5 split. This has been a fantastically good decision.
What’s amusing to me is that the pomodoro timer has improved my productivity way out of proportion to what I expected. I’m very prone to investing lots of time and energy into productivity gizmos which ultimately don’t pay off. The Workrave timer is very simple and works immediately. I simply find that it’s very easy to focus for a 25 minute chunk when I know I’m going to take a 5 minute walk shortly.
Additionally, Nozbe (a GTD implementation) continues to be a good investment. I find myself still failing to sufficiently granularize large tasks. Nozbe ends up not really helping much when it comes to taskifying large projects, but helps a lot with remembering to return emails, remembering to buy birthday cards, acting on important thoughts that happen to hit me in the wrong context, and other inherently “small” items.
META: So, this is probably the third rationality diary entry of mine which mentions Nozbe, and I realize this may be annoying or redundant to other people. From my point of view, I think it’s potentially valuable to track how a person uses a tool over time, rather than merely hearing an initial gushing endorsement followed by silence. Do y’all want me to shut up about Nozbe or should I keep providing a record of my experience?
What would be much more impressive is if it’s still working in 6 months.
I strongly support mentioning something as many times as it’s been used. Maybe it’d be annoying after a dozen times, but not three!
I second wedrifid’s recommendation for evil-mode. (I also use nonstandard bindings ;w ;b ;k for save, switch buffer, kill buffer respectively, and these are a lot faster than the equivalent ex-mode commands would be.) I also use auto-complete-mode just about everywhere; I don’t have semantic completion (it’s on my todo list), but it’s very useful anyway. I like reading camelCase but not typing it, and often I can just type camelca to get camelCase. ido-mode is also a massive win.
On a lower level, binding F5 to compile has been a great improvement for me over my old “move mouse to terminal window, press up-enter” workflow. More recently I got further improvements by rebinding F5 in haxe mode to “find the makefile-equivalent higher in the directory tree, then compile” instead of using “M-x cd” in every buffer.
I haven’t found org-mode as useful as others report. I like its structure, and I’ve written presentations in it; but my emacs start up buffer is an org-mode todo list that I haven’t updated in over a year. This may be a more general problem with myself and todo lists. (I have found that writing them on paper is helpful.)
I recommend this one (or the successor).
If you use org-mode, this is what made my emacs experience reach a whole new level (I literally have every aspect of my life in .org files now—I can tell you what I ate for lunch 7 months ago, which isn’t especially useful but really fun to point out).
You don’t seem like an emacs newbie though, so you might have already seen the above. Recently I came across this setup, which has an inspiring organization and some very cool ideas which might be useful to you. This guy also wrote org-drill, an awesome SRS implementation for emacs—it even supports incremental reading!
I am also using Nozbe, though I wish it would let you create sub-projects.