I’m an opinionated software engineer. I have strongly held beliefs about what makes a program good or bad (as I imagine most programmers do) but as a Vim user for 15 years who changed camps to Emacs, I’m on the front lines of a turf war that shows no signs of calming.

@aaronbieber That doesn’t mean he was wrong :-) Both code bases are pretty horrendous if you look, I’m not sure either is good software. — Michael Ellerman (@michaelellerman)

I believe strongly that “good software” is that which is fit for its intended purpose, and that has both benevolent maintainership and a strong community. Because there is nuance of interpretation in these words, I decided to write more.

Fair warning: this post is long.

In my previous post, Playing Tag in Org Mode, I talked about leveraging Org Mode’s powerful tag system to help you find the notes or references you’re looking for.

Since then, I’ve refined my use of tags and begun making better use of Org Mode’s custom ID abilities. In this post, I’ll share the new navigation code I’ve written and show you how you can use custom IDs to link or jump directly to a specific item in your notes.

Also, as a special treat, I will debut my latest Emacs package, Tiny Menu (available right now on MELPA).

Once you have achieved Org Mode Nirvana (hopefully with the help of my previous post, Dig into Org Mode) and you have over 2,500 lines of Org notes and TODO lists as I do (I’m serious; see the screenshot below), you’ll want to seriously up your agenda game so that you can find stuff quickly.

One way to collate related information across Org files is by using tags. I’m not a tagging expert, but I’ll tell you what I know.

I am mildly obsessed with window management. When I ran Linux full-time, I tried nearly every window management system I could find and ultimately fell in love with “tiling” window managers. I used Xmonad for more than a year and then switched to i3.

I have used a Mac at home for a long time and previously tried Slate and Spectacle for moving windows around quickly. When I was finally able to get a Mac at work I refocused my efforts into finding just the right solution.

I was quite happy with Spectacle until a colleague showed me that Slate now supports Javascript configuration, which makes it possible to do very sophisticated things. I used that facility to re-implement my favorite feature of Spectacle: the ability to cycle a window through three different sizes along one screen edge.

Here I’ll show you how it’s done. If you don’t desperately want to code up your own Slate system after reading this, I’ve done something terribly wrong.

Org mode was one of the main reasons I tried Emacs (and left behind 15 years of Vim), and now it is a central part of how I organize my work. Org mode can help you take notes, track tasks, build agendas, process tabular data, and more. It’s so flexible that everyone uses it differently.

I use Org mode primarily to capture tasks and keep track of their progress. I sometimes take notes in Org mode, but I haven’t completely fleshed out my note-taking and searching workflow, so I’ll talk mostly about task management here.