Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Frederik]

Hi There!

Until now I've taken notes and did extracts/abstracts of the books I had 
to read by hand, i.e. with pen & paper.

Now I want to switch to the digital world... What could be more natural 
than using emacs, because I already use it with AucTeX to create my 
latex documents.

What I basically need is ordering of the abstracts and full-text search 
for my notes. Printing the notes would be useful, too.

Google brought up several modes; org-mode seems promising, but I never 
tried it before.

How do you take notes? Any special suggestions? I thought it could be 
helpful to ask on this list before trying out several modes...

Thanks & Regards,
Fred


-- 
Frederik

freak.fred@gmail.com

Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Jambunathan K]

> Google brought up several modes; org-mode seems promising, but I never
> tried it before.

Look no further than org-mode. If you are looking elsewhere you are
wasting your time.

This is a good place to start: http://orgmode.org/worg/

You may also want to join or follow the emacs-orgmode mailing list.



Jambunathan K.

-- 

Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Fri, Jul 01 2011, Frederik wrote:

> Hi There!
>
> Until now I've taken notes and did extracts/abstracts of the books I
> had to read by hand, i.e. with pen & paper.
>
> Now I want to switch to the digital world... What could be more
> natural than using emacs, because I already use it with AucTeX to
> create my latex documents.
>
> What I basically need is ordering of the abstracts and full-text
> search for my notes. Printing the notes would be useful, too.
>
> Google brought up several modes; org-mode seems promising, but I never
> tried it before.
>
> How do you take notes? Any special suggestions? I thought it could be
> helpful to ask on this list before trying out several modes...
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Fred

Google did not lie: org-mode is one of the best emacs modes for this
sort of thing. Structured, outline-style documents, flexible search (and
"search view") options, metadata galore, and in your case the icing on
the cake would be direct export to LaTeX source code. In fact, you can
mingle your notes/research and original writing in a single file, and
selectively export just the bits that you want.

Many people primarily use emacs just to be able to use org-mode…

Eric

Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Andreas Röhler]

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Am 01.07.2011 12:27, schrieb Frederik:
> Hi There!
>
> Until now I've taken notes and did extracts/abstracts of the books I had
> to read by hand, i.e. with pen & paper.
>
> Now I want to switch to the digital world... What could be more natural
> than using emacs, because I already use it with AucTeX to create my
> latex documents.
>
> What I basically need is ordering of the abstracts and full-text search
> for my notes. Printing the notes would be useful, too.
>
> Google brought up several modes; org-mode seems promising, but I never
> tried it before.
>
> How do you take notes? Any special suggestions? I thought it could be
> helpful to ask on this list before trying out several modes...
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Fred
>
>

Hi, the file attached stores data together with it's location.

Call `M-x note-with-url' with an active region.

It's designed to take notes from Emacs-w3m browser, but works with any 
buffer.

Notes are stored in files setting up variables listing paired entries 
like this:

(setq nwu-example
       (quote
        (list
        ("Thanks to many of the other people for the great 
contributions." . "http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/")

("Vor dem Bundesfinanzhof müssen sich die Beteiligten
     durch Prozessbevollmächtigte vertreten lassen. Dies gilt
     auch für Prozesshandlungen, durch die ein Verfahren vor
     dem Bundesfinanzhof eingeleitet wird." . 
"/MY-LOCAL/PATH/gesetze/rechtsberatungsrecht.txt")
)))

When taking notes from Emacs Mail, remember.el will be more suitable maybe.


Andreas

--
https://code.launchpad.net/~a-roehler/python-mode/components-python-mode
https://code.launchpad.net/s-x-emacs-werkstatt/




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Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Richard Riley]

Frederik <freak.fred@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi There!
>
> Until now I've taken notes and did extracts/abstracts of the books I had to read
> by hand, i.e. with pen & paper.
>
> Now I want to switch to the digital world... What could be more natural than
> using emacs, because I already use it with AucTeX to create my latex documents.
>
> What I basically need is ordering of the abstracts and full-text search for my
> notes. Printing the notes would be useful, too.
>
> Google brought up several modes; org-mode seems promising, but I never tried it
> before.
>
> How do you take notes? Any special suggestions? I thought it could be helpful to
> ask on this list before trying out several modes...
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Fred

org-mode

It does it all  : you can have it as easy or complex as you like and it
ships with a hist of utilities such as gnus integration, html export,
journaling etc etc.

And. more importantly, its a dynamic, polite and responsive development
team working on it which is always open to suggestions and willing to
help which is not bogged down in politics.

Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Frederik]

Thanks for all your answers!

I tried org-mode and after browsing the manual I'm convinced. Now 
note-taking is actually fun :-)

-- 
Frederik

Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[suvayu ali]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:36 PM, Frederik <freak.fred@gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried org-mode and after browsing the manual I'm convinced. Now
> note-taking is actually fun :-)
>

A word of caution: the awesomeness of org-mode can sometimes consume
you and make you forget your original intention. ;)

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.