EmacsConf 2019 - Use Org mode when away from the desktop

Hello everyone, my name is Alain and I’m going to give you a ten minute introduction to Organize. This is what we’re going to do, I’ll give a quick introduction to me, I’ll tell you all about Organize, you’ll get a real-time demonstration and I’ll finish with some closing words. So without further ado, who am I? I am the co-founder and CEO of a company based in Zurick, Switzerland called 200OK, we are a product incubator but we also do customer projects. We are very polyglot in that we like to use many programming languages and technologies and we spend as much time as we can on free and open source software. For the last nine years I’ve also been a lecturer at the Zurick University of Applied Sciences and I am an ordained Zen-monk and I run the ?? temple in the mountains of ??. If you want to reach me please send me an email at any time to alain@200ok.ch .
Why would you even care who I am? So I gave that little prefix to say that I dabble in quite a few different things and to be able to manage it all I kind of have to be a ?tooling? nut. And I am.
For example I even got the job interview to be a lecturer by accident because I gave a talk on getting things done some nine years ago and then got invited. Which in turn means that over the last fifteen years I went over great many different tools and processes and since six years I have settled, I am very happy now, and I spend most of my work reading, communication and writing all within Emacs. And within there Org-mode is my daily driver. I use it for everything. For project management, time tracking, doing quotes, book-keeping, controlling, giving presentations, and so much more. I am very happily commited to using Org-mode and Emacs.
Then what even is Organize? I mean if Org-mode is so great, why would we need a new tool? Well there’s two pragmatic reasons, one is it’s not really convenient to have a laptop and PC handy all the time. And secondly, not everyone is an Emacs user unfortunately. So I would have this proposition, if you’re a fan of Org-mode you probably want to have access to your Org files at any point in time, even if you’re away from your computer. And you still want to use good collaboration tools with other people, so you still want to continue using Org-mode even if they’re not Emacs users. And now there is a solution for that, it’s called Organize. Organize is an implementation of Org-mode without the dependency of Emacs. It’s built for mobile and desktop browsers and syncs with DropBox and Google Drive.
This is what it looks like. But before I show you how it works, let me tell you a little bit about how we develop it. Of course it is free and open source software, it has the AGPL license, there’s a public code of conduct, the contributing guidelines are up there, you can find the code repository documentation on GitHub. And we built it using popular front-end frameworks, mainly React and Redux, we want to use the popular frameworks here because we want to enable the widest range possible of contributors, and not have a lock-in to a smaller niche. So let me give you a demo. I’ll give you a demo on my machine because as I said it’s optimized for mobile and desktop use so I can use it on my computer from the browser. You could follow along by going to Organize.200okay.ch, of course you can host it yourself, but you can also use our free instance, and no worries, there is no back-end, it’s a front-end only application. So there’s no storage of any kind of data, personal or not, on our servers. We also don’t use analytics, so it’s I would say safe to use.
?Inception? time, let’s check out some Org-mode features and Organize, but before we do that, let me show you that we’ve actually been within Emacs and in the rendering of an Org-mode file all the time, so the slide is the same on the left and on the right, and wouldn’t it be great if we could open this right within Organize. And of course we can. Right here I am logged into Organize.200ok.ch so I have access to my files, it’s the same file, and you can see this is the demo slide that we’ve just been on. But let me show you some more basic and core features of Emacs Org-mode. So you’re probably familiar with todos and of course we support them. You can toggle todos. Can delete them. You can see that the metadata up here is changing. Of course you can edit headers, make it a new header, edit descriptions. There is support for tags so for example, ?Louise? has some tags in here and I can add all the tags that the system already knows. I can remove them. I can create new tags. ?oh?, it’s adapted. We can focus and drill down as the narrowing feature can, and it can go further down.
And up again. We can of course add and remove headers, so let me make a new header, or remove an old one. We can move headers around so for example here is a couple of cool things, so for example if I wanted to move Emacs out and get rid of the text editors that works, ?but/that? I can also for example move this further out and you can see how they are attached if I bring it down or out or I can move it back into again. You might have seen that this thing is turning all the time whenever I make any change because we have implicity syncing, so everything is synced to my DropBox right now.
We do have undo and redo on the top of the application there is a redo, sorry an undo and redo button. ?? there is support for tables, we can change values within tables, ?say ch-ed?, we can add new columns and rows, we can also remove them. There is support for lists and checkboxes, plain lists, ordered lists. Checkboxes work as you would think they do. There is support for timestamps. It understands if you gave it more information like a start and end time you can set repeaters and delays. The regular things that work in Org-mode timestamps. There is support for property lists, you can remove and add new properties.
There is support for planning, so you have an agenda, all the items that have deadlines and schedules are visible within the agenda. There’s a daily agenda, weekly agenda, monthly agenda and you can jump right into the todo itself.
And lastly there is
?ketchla? template support, so I have a ?ketcha? template setup for this file and it will add stuff to the inbox here, so when I create new stuff in here, it is put directly into the inbox and synced. So let’s go back into the presentation and the closing words. But before I give you the closing words, let’s quickly check out how the Org-file changed on my machine, because of course it did, because all the synchronization happened. For example you can see that there is new stuff in the inbox, I created new deadlines, I deleted some properties, and added some new ones, I checked some check boxes. You can see all the things that I did are there. Quite nice. *
Okay closing words, there is related work going on next to Organize, right now we’re using a custom parser written in JavaScript for the Org-files, and it works quite fine and it has unit-tests to prove it, however, we want to redo and write a parser, a proper parser in BNF, and we’re doing this in Closure and Closure-Script. If you’re interested in this project you can check it out on our GitLab instance, also free and open source software of course. We write quite frequently about Emacs and Org-mode, if you want to catch up please go to our website, and lastly please check Organize out, you can go to the repository if you liked the talk, please give it a star. And, go ahead and check it out on Organize.200ok.ch, you don’t even have to log in, you can just try it out. Okay, thank you for listening, thank you for your time, and have fun and enjoy using Organize and Emacs of course.

Use Org mode when away from the desktop - Zen Monk Alain M. Lafon