Re: Migrating my current work flow to org-mode

[Eric S Fraga <ucecesf@ucl.ac.uk>]

Dov Grobgeld <dov.grobgeld@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> During the last few days I have learned about org-mode and I'm starting to plan how to change my
> current work flow to org-mode. My current work flow is as follows:
>
> * At the beginning of every new day I create a horizontal line and a time stamp.
> * I use mediawiki == headers == for headers and * for bulleted items.

If you are able to consider moving away from this format, org mode has a
really nice date-tree format which is ideal for journal recording.
Top level headings are years, second level are months and third level
are days.  You can enter new entries with just a couple of key presses using
the org-capture feature!

I have something like this for setting this up:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(setq org-capture-templates 
      '( ("j" "journal" entry (file+datetree "~/git/notes/journal.org")
	  "* %^{Entry} %^G\n%i%?" :immediate-finish t)))
#+end_src

[...]

> So now I am trying to figure out how to map this into org-mode. Here are some observations and
> questions:
>
>   * The horizontal rule is ok in paragraph mode.
>   * The timestamp is ok by doing C-c .
>   * But the "worked line" doesn't work if I try to use "C-c C-x TAB" as it complains "Before first
>     headline". I could turn the row into a header or just insert plain text. Is there a more elegant
>     solution? I don't want to have the "worked" line indexed. Note that the "worked" line is used at
>     the end of the month to summarize the amount of work hours.

You need a heading in which clock info can be entered.  If you use the
date-tree format, you'll automatically have each day within a heading.

>   * Is there any way of separating headers from items? I like the non-symmetry of the "==" syntax
>     for headers and "*" for items, but I guess I can get used to that.

You can use lists for items (lists can start with -, numbers, and
others).

>   * At my previous work place I used the same notebook file for more than 10years(!) of notes, and
>     needless to say it got to be very big (around 100k lines). Can
>     org-mode handle that size files?

I believe so although my files are all under 1MB corresponding to about
10k lines so I'm not the right person to answer this...  However, many
of the operations I do are on several such files simultaneously so I'm
probably approaching 100k lines in total and most operations respond
immediately.  The performance will depend on what you want to do with
this file.

>   * How can I customize the exported HTML? E.g. I don't like the table of contents or the numbering
>     of headers. 

Trivial.  Everything is customisable!

> But alltogether org-mode looks great! I'm looking forward to use it
> both on my desktop and in emacs on my N900.

I used to use org on my N8x0 computers and loved it.

HTH,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 23.2.1
: using Org-mode version 7.3 (release_7.3.36.g6c95)