Re: org-mode tutorial questionaire

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:

> Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:
>
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>> Alexander Poslavsky <alexander.poslavsky@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> There is a new tutorial on worg: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/
>>> org4beginners.php. The idea is to write a tutorial for somebody who is
>>> new to org-mode.
>> ...
>>> For everybody:
>>> -What kind of tutorial would be the most useful? 
>>> -What in your experience people find confusing?
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time to put this on Worg. I wish I had had such a
>> concise summary of the various flavors of emacs on different platforms
>> when I started exploring org-mode.
>>
>> I was wondering if you could elaborate on the following. Are you
>> suggesting that new users should never use M-x customize?
>
> As a general comment on this : I used to hand code all my
> customisations. And ran into terrible problems somewhere along the
> line. Now anything that has a customise interface, I use that interface
> and have had no such problems anymore. The downside of course is that
> your customisations are not grouped "logically" with comments -but, for
> me anyway, using the customisation interface lends itself to much more
> trustworthy code.

I also use customize extensively -- wherever it is available.  I don't
have to worry about the exact syntax of the value of the variable - I
can just use the customize interface and pick what I want and move on to
more productive things.

I used to hand code variables as Richard did but found I wasted a heck
of a lot more time fiddling with the syntax of a variable doing that
instead of just setting it and forgetting it with the customize
interface.  The customize interface that Carsten has put together also
makes it easy to see all of the options for a variable in org-mode.

Some variables need to be set before org-mode is loaded (when using
setq) but as I understand it this isn't the case for customizations.

Regards,
Bernt

PS.

I keep my ~/.emacs -> ~/git/emacs/emacs.el and ~/git/emacs/custom.el
files in a git repository (~/git/emacs) so I can commit changes to these
files and add meaningful comments about the reason for the change in the
commit message.  This lets me easily experiment with changing half a
dozen variables and not worrying about remembering the old values in
case I want to go back.  Git has the information and it's easy to
restore the old values for any point in the git history.  This also lets
me synchronize variable changes to my laptop so my on-the-road org-mode
setup is identical to my workstation.