If you are a terminal guy as I am, or if you’re a terminal gal, you may be inclined to use Emacs in the terminal as well. A couple of my friends who took up Vim got used to running it within tmux and exchanged one terminal program for the other. This is wrong.

The GUI Emacs program is not just a crutch for the ignorant fools with their fingers all gnarled by mouse overuse; no, GUI Emacs is much more powerful, and there is almost no reason at all to run Emacs in a terminal. Ever.

Let me explain why.

I’m going to show you how you can create a “bookmarklet” button in your browser that will capture a note or link directly into Org Mode in your running Emacs. That’s right, you press a button in, say, Chrome, and Emacs pops up and displays your Org capture interface with the current webpage’s information in it.

How is this achieved? Through a little bit of magic called “Org Protocol.”

Hopefully you already know that you can insert common markup blocks in Org Mode by entering a prefix like <s and pressing <M-TAB>. Org Mode publicly calls these “Easy Templates” but internally calls them “structure templates.” I wanted to be able to insert a couple of other common Org-specific blocks, so I figured out how to add my own.

Now that you have read An Agenda for Life with Org Mode, you know how to build the perfect agenda for managing the tasks in your life. But, I ask you, what good is a task that you cannot complete?

Fortunately, Org Mode provides a rich set of interactive commands for manipulating your task entries directly from the agenda view and, in fine Emacs style, the commands relevant to each type of view will apply only to the appropriate section of a composite view.

I’ve tweaked and customized my interface to the agenda and so I want to share with you the most useful commands and a couple of the things I have added.

I’ve been promising the Twitterverse that I would write more about how I use Org Mode to get stuff done and how I use it to be a better manager. Upon careful reflection, there is too much to cover in just one post, so this is the first of what will likely be several posts on these topics.

Today I would like to focus on the “agenda view” and how I’ve configured it to give me a window into what I need to do now, what is on the horizon, and manage which things I should do first.

This is what we’ll build: