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

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GNU Emacs as a Comic Book Reader

Image
  Comics are available in digital format as a collection of images in a compressed ZIP or RAR file (.cbz or .cbr file extension respectively). These can be enjoyed in GNU Emacs with full access to image viewing capabilities using keybindings.   # Make sure you have unrar installed for CBR files # apt install unrar   (require 'arc2-mode)   (setq archive-summarize-files-fn 'archive-summarize-files-as-thumb)     Note: The archive-mode is capable of displaying the list of files in an archive; though it depends on external tools for extraction. For JPG and PNG, Emacs can resize the image without external convertor (ie. imagemagick). However, some menu options for image transformations in image-mode might not be available. Use the following patch for image-mode.el . @@ -460,16 +460,16 @@ image-mode-map       :help "Show image as hex"]      "--"      ["Fit to Window Height" image-transform-fit-to-...
Read more

HTML Renderer (Emacs)

Image
  Emacs: A non-intrusive browser An Elisp implementation of HTML rendering using SVG. The browser functionality is an extension of eww . For Javascript, you can use either NodeJS or QuickJS as a JS interpreter . Developer Note: The entry point is shr-render.   Table Colspan example Rowspan example Sample Table <html>   <body>     <table border="1">       <tr bgcolor="#9acd32">         <th style="text-align:left">Title</th>         <th style="text-align:left">Artist</th>       </tr>       <tr>         <td>Empire Burlesque</td>         <td>Bob Dylan</td>       </tr>     </table>   </body> </html...
Read more

Mozilla Readability in GNU Emacs

Image
  Output using Readability (left) and original eww (right)   Mozilla Readability is a standalone version of the readability library used for Firefox Reader View . A simple hack to eww can bring the same feature in GNU Emacs. ( Note: eww already has a readable mode. This is just an alternative. Updated the post to reflect the same.)   - Install NodeJS   - Install npm modules. npm install @mozilla/readability jsdom   - Create a file readability.js with following content. Note the file location. var { Readability } = require('@mozilla/readability'); var { JSDOM } = require('jsdom'); var fs = require("fs"); var str = fs.readFileSync(process.stdin.fd).toString(); var doc = new JSDOM(str); var reader = new Readability(doc.window.document); var article = reader.parse(); console.log(article.content);     - Modify the following function to use the file location noted above . Evaluate the function. (defun mozilla-readability (start end)   (shell-command-o...
Read more