NotDeft is an Emacs-based manager and local search engine for directories of plain text notes. NotDeft features a Xapian backend for efficient free-text search over potentially very large numbers of note files; in that respect it is like the Notmuch Emacs mode for managing email. NotDeft is a spin-off of the Deft note manager, and retains similar functionality for browsing, filtering, and managing note collections. While NotDeft inherits its user interface from Deft, that interface is used for managing search result sets of notes, rather than directory contents.
In an earlier blog post I wrote about using Emacs Org mode for calendaring, and exporting iCalendar files with TIMEZONE information (including “VTIMEZONE” definitions, as specified by RFC 5545). Another side of the picture is importing from iCalendar into Org, and in this post I introduce a little Ruby script I recently finished writing for that purpose. I don't think I'm the first person to have written a half-baked script for iCalendar-to-Org import, but the special requirement I had was that I wanted to be able to interpret “DATE WITH UTC TIME” values in a non-standard way, and convert them into “floating” times (without time zone information).
For several years I used Symbian phones for calendaring, and the biggest issue for me was the lack of support for time zones: there was neither a way to specify a “floating” time, nor could you select a specific time zone for an appointment. Times would be interpreted in the context of the currently selected system-wide local time zone, and shifted later when changing the time zone setting. Consequently, I avoided ever changing time zones to retain the times as entered.
I'm increasingly using NotDeft not only for note taking, but also for capturing information from various sources. To some extent it already acts as a lightweight substitute for the likes of Evernote. As explained in the documentation, Org mode's built-in capture protocol can be used to send snippets of text from a page open in a web browser into one's NotDeft note collection. Sometimes, however, we already have a URL of an interesting page in our clipboard, and we would like to fetch the entire page's textual content into NotDeft with a single command.
My NotDeft note manager has an optional notdeft-path feature to better support transient directories of notes. Also in the standard configuration, the notdeft-directories list may contain directories that do not have to always exist, as any non-existing directories are simply ignored; if and when they appear, they can be included in subsequent searches. Note, however, that the notdeft-directories variable is normally set only once, and if the initializer expression includes wildcards, the variable value may not contain directories that get mounted or copied over later.
I sometimes turn Org format notes into blog posts (as in the case of this one), and when doing so it's good to be mindful of how Org links get translated on export. In some cases we want the output link to have the absolute path of the resource (for the site, not the file system), but no URL scheme or authority part. Emacs Org mode (as of version 9) interprets scheme-less links with an absolute path as file: links of the same path.
Earlier I blogged about Epresent, which is basically a piece of code for making Org-Mode suitable for preparing presentation slides. There are times when I can’t resist mentioning the innovative Racket programming language in a presentation. In those situations I tend to want to have syntax-highlighted Scheme code on my slides, and also to evaluate the code snippets and insert the results next to the code listing. This is apparently the sort of thing one can do with Org-Mode Babel, for a variety of languages.
Text rendering in Emacs has been looking mighty good since 23.1, and this opens up possibilities to do even more in Emacs. For example, I recently came across something called epresent.el on GitHub, by Eric Schulte et al. The epresent.el Emacs Lisp file leverages Org-Mode to implement a simple presentation mode for Emacs. Using Org-Mode is, at least for me, faster than struggling with something like OpenOffice.org Impress.
Having discovered epresent.