Org-mode - Your life in plain text

Sep 7, 2022 · 2 min read · todo manager publishing tui  ·
Share on:

Org-mode is a super-powerful Emacs plugin to manage outlines using a plain text storage format. Items can be associated to timestamps, priorities, labels, and many other metadata, and they can be shown grouped by time (agenda), tags, etc.

About Org-mode

Org-mode, also referred simply as Org, is not strictly a CLI program by its own, since it requires Emacs to run. However, I believe it is worth to dedicate it an article in CLIpedia given that it is typically used in a CLI-like keyboard-driven manner.

Main features and applications

At its core, it is a collection of keybindings to efficiently manage lists of bullet points. Starting from this feature, it can be used for many applications.

Org-mode can be fruitfully used to manage TODO lists, where each TODO becomes an item in the bullet list organization. Given its ability to associate metadata with the lists, it natively supports priorities, tags, deadlines, scheduled times, time accounting, etc. It can automatically generate agendas with all the planned activities. For this reason, it can be effectively used for project planning.

The same approach can be leveraged to use Org-mode as a publishing tool. Bullet points allow to organize a document into sections, and non-indented text becomes the actual content of the sections. Org-mode provides the facilities to export the document into many common and useful formats, from HTML to LaTeX.

References