moving to emacs org-mode

I’m in the process of getting to grips with the emacs org-mode for my list management (I’m a fan of David Allens GTD stuff).

I have been using a Zaurus PDA for 2 1/2 years (Psions before that), and found the excellent IQnotes was pretty good for what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a pain to have to type in things which came through on email etc, and I found myself refraining from moving from the laptop to the PDA to enter something. In fact, sometimes I would write it in a post-it and stick that on the PDA case, with the aim of adding it later that day! It wasn’t seamless enough I suppose.

I also use a laptop running Suse (9.3 at present) and have been a UNIX user since around 1986, using emacs for all my basic text processing and mail reading (with MH and mh-e). Anyway, after finding out about the 43 folders site http://www.43folders.com/ I saw some posts about using emacs and planner mode for GTD. I loaded it up, but it didn’t seem as if it would suit me, so kept searching, and found org-mode (which is basically a souped up outline-mode which most emacs users will be familiar with). Org-mode, at the moment, looks as if it does what I want.

I dumped my Zaurus iqnotes XML file into my laptop at the weekend, converted it to html, loaded the html up into freemind, and then used a utility that comes with freemind to convert from freemind to outline-mode. A bit of editing, and I had all my lists in emacs, which is up all day, every day with me. (I suppose I could have hacked the XSL script to go to outline mode, but I didn’t have the XSL ref book at home).

So, we shall see how things go. I’m using the lists much more now that they are in another emacs window to the right of my emacs mail window.

[NOTE: This post should be read before the previous post. Can’t even copy and paste in the right order! :-(]