(2017-12-14) Fogleman Building A Second Brain In Emacs And Orgmode

Michael Fogleman: Building a Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode. I haven’t always had a good system for personal knowledge management (PKM).

How do some people do it? What are the rewards of a trustworthy PKM system?

Building A Second Brain extends GTD, and focuses on the reference materials problem

I have used Emacs and Org-Mode for years, to manage my tasks, make notes, and more. Together, they form the most powerful software system I’ve ever come across. I didn’t want to have to give that up for a new system

Tiago uses Evernote for storing his reference materials, and it serves as the reference implementation for the course.

I decided to use Evernote for the course, as suggested, but I had an ultimate goal: to implement a combined GTD/BASB workflow using Org-Mode

Org-Mode is an application within Emacs, used for outlining, note-taking, project management, literate programming, and more–all with plain text

Emacs treats everything as text — not just text files, but also things that aren’t usually thought of as text, like RSS feeds, emails, files, even games.

Here are some of the concepts and tools that I’ve learned through using Emacs:

Literate programming:

What principles have I learned?

Keyboard first:

Outlining: Org-Mode takes the view that everything is (or is related to) an outline item. Org-Mode is the best outliner I’ve come across.

Software is memetic: Emacs configurations typically have snippets copied and adapted from others. Will Mengarini and others have compared this to evolution and horizontal transfer