Alternatives in GNU Emacs - File Explorer



Traditionally, Operating Systems (OS) have had folders as an organization entity for collection of files. Documents, Videos, Photos and Downloads folders cover most of the use-cases. However, if you have used it for some length of time, you'll realize it is not enough.

For instance, this blog post is a collection of text, images, videos and web URLs. And while working on this idea, I need all of these at my disposal. Or atleast an easy way to access all these related resources. That's when it clicked to me why some people are gung-ho about org-mode! Often, it's better to organize files around ideas rather than file types.

For a beginner, org-mode might seem daunting. I myself ignored it completely till few days back. Don't worry about learning the syntax in depth. Even if you are not using the advanced features, there's lot to be gained. Here's complete list of types of links you can store in a text file and access it using (org-open-at-point). (Note: Other alternatives are built-in find-file-at-point and Hyperbole (hkey-either). Your choice will probably depend on the types of links supported out-of-the-box by each package.)

One added advantage is the tagging capability of org-mode. You'll possibly benefit much more by tagging your notes in org-mode than tagging individual files in the OS. What could be better? Possibly a way to tag a collection of notes!!

 

Where to start?

I don't have a solid recommendation yet. org-roam seems to be a good start. It is built on top of org-mode and uses a sqlite database for storing the metadata.

 

Bonus: Saving and inserting links

Use org-store-link for storing a link to the current document or any other interesting link as you encounter them. Later, while preparing your notes, you can use org-insert-link to insert and arrange the links.

 

References

 

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