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:

As you certainly know by now, I was an outspoken and enthusiastic Vim user for about 15 years. During that time, I tried Emacs a couple of times, but it didn’t really stick until last year. One of the reasons Emacs makes me so happy is its Lisp-based extension language (Emacs Lisp, or just Elisp for short).

I do not have a formal background in computer science, so I never had the experience of being forced to do exercises in Scheme or Lisp; Elisp is the first (and only) Lisp I’ve ever learned. For that reason, I’m sure I went about it all wrong, but I think I know it pretty well now and I want to share with you some of the tricks and concepts I’ve learned so you can hopefully have an easier time than I did.

Introductory Lisp articles abound, so I will try to focus on the Emacs features and functions that make Elisp development unique.