Writing a Journal in Emacs

My Story

I have trying to learn a bit more about emacs as well, it has always drawn me towards itself – when I started using it, maybe it was the old school appeal which this editor had. Sure, Vim had it too but using HJKL for moving the cursor around and pressing double escape didn’t appeal to the kid me. C-x C-f to open a file, C-x C-c exited the editor – how cool was that. I know this isn’t the best of rating and differentiating about the two great editors, but I chose Emacs and was hooked for some stupid reason.

In the last few days, I’ve started messing around with the idea that I should start writing a bit of emacs lisp to extend the power, and to mould the editor in the way I want it to work. That quickly turned into looking around on the internet how to go about it, and soon I came across org-mode.

While I still have a lot to learn about the features of that mode, the first thing I wanted to do was to start taking notes in that. People use it for a lot of complex tasks: a TODO list for instance, but I’m not that hooked to emacs. I still use Trello for creating my TODO list. Maybe someday when I’ll start living more than half of my working day in emacs, I’ll start using it for so many other purposes as well.

And we move ahead!

The first thing in order to create a journal is to create an org file. These usually end with an extension of org. So place these at some convinient location, mine is placed in ~/.org/journal.org.

The journalling is done by using org-capture mode which allows us to quickly capture notes and ideas. These captured elements can be of multiple types; what types? That you have to decide: Todo list, Journal, Appointment, Project-ideas, etc. anything which has a form of sometype can be used.

Specifically to journalling, we’ll start what is called a capturing template because we want each of our journal entry to have some fixed structure. Remember that this structure (hence the template) is supposed to be present for almost everything: Todo lists have predefined structure, Appointments have one, and so forth.

For the above two things, let’s make some changes in our .emacs file:

• require org

  1	(require 'org)

• Associate files ending with .org (and in my case .txt) with org-mode.

  1	(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.\\(org\\|txt\\)" . org-mode))

• Setup a global keybinding for capturing notes (this isn’t set by default):

  1	(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'org-capture)

• Setup org-capture-templates which tells us what to capture for our entry:

  1 2 3 4 5

  (setq org-capture-templates '(("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline "~/.org/inbox.org" "Inbox") "* TODO %?\n %i\n %a") ("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/.org/journal.org") "* %?\nEntered on %U\n %i\n %a")))

Now the template has a fixed structure (in-depth treatment can be found in the official docs here:

1

(key description type target template)

Key is the key which you’ll press after C-c c (or whatever you bound org-capture to. In the above example, pressing j will create a journal entry.

Description is the description of the template which comes up when you press C-c C-c chord.

Type is the type of entry you want in the org-file, it can be:

• entry
• item
• checkitem
• table-line
• plain