On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Rustom Mody
<rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi James.
If you do not grok text its unlikely you will appreciate a text editor.
emacs is not just a text editor its an exceptionally powerful text editor -- a power which is likely to alienate you even more.
So the best suggestion to someone who wishes to get into orgmode but finds text (and text editors) unpleasant is to give up on orgmode, just dig into emacs' simpler uses for a while and when a little more comfortable (with emacs) try org again. Hopefully then your questions will be more focused to this list and the answers will be more useful to you.
That said, there is some merit in (some of) what you say.
org is so many different things at the same time that for a noob to find one's way through the documentation to make his usecase work with minimum pain seems to be unnecessarily hard.
The beginner's customization guide:
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html
is of course a starting point.
But I wonder if it would be possible to structure it into something like this outline so that different beginners could start at different places?
* Brainstorming-n-outlining
TAB and the basic structure navigation and editing features
* Exporting and Publishing
*** html export
*** Odt export
*** Web publishing
*** Latex publishing
*** Presentations
***** Lightweight options
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html
***** Beamer
* Babel
*** For programming
*** For teaching programming
*** For doing science (R)
*** For scientific publishing (R+Latex)
* Time/project mgmt (GTD)
*** Agenda
*** Time tracking
*** capture-archive
*** Journalling
*** org-habit
* Tables and spreadsheets
* Integration with other emacs uses
*** gnus
*** bbdb/ org-contacts
*** firefox (org-protocol)
*** graphics (R, ditaa...)
I would actually suggest to have a general introduction (what is org, what can it do, what are the principles of org) and then go into different usage scenarios and how to fulfill certain tasks. For example, I am using org-mode exclusively for literate programming and some document writing, but not for task management, calendar, email, etc. So at the beginning, I was really confused by the whole agenda and publishing stuff, until I realized, that I don't need it at all for what I am doing.
And after looking at your suggested outline, it is going into that direction, but I would put e.g. "Exporting and Publishing" after the different usage scenarios. so:
* Basic org
** what is it and what is it not
** what can it do
** principles and basics of org
*** org capture
* Usage scenarios
** Time Management
*** calendar
*** ...
** spreadsheets
*** ...
** task manager