Re: Taking notes / excerptions with emacs

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

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