How I Use Emacs to Take Notes

[music] So, I have been using Emacs now for quite some time, actually, getting close to 6 months, maybe even longer than that. And I'm an Emacs guy now. Like, it's just the absolute truth. So, as time has progressed and I've come to terms with the fact that I'm now an Emacs guy and I've abandoned Vim like a the ultimate betrayal, I have started to move some of my processes for the things that I do over to Emacs. Now, this has been a slow progress. A lot of stuff was more manual as I was doing the whole Emacs thing and I was kind of doing stuff just by hand, but I've started to focus more on automation like I once did with them. And now all of my stuff is moved to Emacs and all of it is automated. What I want to talk about today is how I take notes in Emacs. Now I'm not going to focus so much on the configuration parts of this process. If you want to see my Emacs config, you can go to my get my code bird which is linked down in the video description. You'll find that it is a mess. Like it is the biggest Emacs config you'll probably ever see. that is not like a distribution version of Emacs, but it is what it is. Instead, what I'm going to focus on today is actually the process of how I take notes because I think that that's more interesting, at least for me, than the actual bits and code of it. So, let's go ahead and take a look at my Emacs and I'll show you some of the processes that I use to actually take notes in this awesome program. So, first off, this is my Emac config. I've probably shown this off just a little bit, but there are several ways that I do take notes. So, if I want to take a daily note, so I have a process where I can take a a note that basically logs the things that I do every day, has some general thoughts for the day. You can call it a journal if you want. I call it a daily, whatever you want to do. I want to seem more masculine by not calling it a diary, but [laughter] it is what it is. So, if I wanted to do that, I do space and then the letter D, like so. And it will take me to today's daily note. Now, if it hasn't if I if that note hasn't been created yet, it will create it. If it has been created, it will take it to take me to the note that's already been created, so I don't actually lose anything. Obviously, I still need to save it on my own. But, this just basically allows me to take a note here. I can do stuff I did today, thoughts, mood, things to do for tomorrow. I can track all of my habits and stuff like that. And it's just basically my daily note. Now, I'm not as good actually filling this out as I should be because I've been moving more towards analog notes for this kind of thing. But this is one of the ways I do take notes. If I want to take a quick note, I can do space and then Q and it'll just open up a dated markdown file for QuickNote. And this will store it in my QuickNotes directory by month. So it'll I'll have 2026 and then it'll have January, it'll have February and so on and so forth, right? So this allows me if you know I just go here and this is a note and then if I say save save it, it'll actually save it in the appropriate file which you can kind of see down here at the bottom. So then I can obviously go back through this if I need to and just see what I've taken over time if I'm just taking a regular quick note. Now, most of the time when I want to take a note or start a note, I'm not actually in Emac. So, if I close Emacs here and then I run a key binding called AltP, you can see I have a roy selected for this. Now, I can browse through my notes. In this case, these are my idea notes. So, if I wanted to create a blog post idea, I'll create a blog post. And then I can do I can create a new directory from here. And this is just uh regular ideas. And then I'll just type the title of the note. This is a note. And then we'll open Emacs in that spot with that title. And then I can just take my note. This is a note to and then I just save that. And then I can do the same thing. If I go to browse blog post ideas, we can actually see that it's actually not there. I apparently didn't save it. Anyways, that's okay. But if I had saved it like a normal person, it would have been here in this directory. So I can actually go to previously saved notes and view them through ROI. I don't have to go to my file manager at all. I can do the same thing for other ideas. I have general ideas stuff for for my histo channel which is basically abandoned at this point and for TLC itself. Those are my idea notes, but I also have one for daily notes and quick notes. So if I go to my previous quicknotes here, I can actually test. You can actually see the ones that I just created right now. So this is the the one that I just created. It'll actually show you the one that I just created as a quick note when I was Emacs. This is a note obviously very eloquent. And I can also create them from this keybinding as well. So I can do a daily note or a quick note. I can browse all the previous ones that I've done. And that's really cool. Right. So, those are the two primary ways I actually do take notes is with the those ROI scripts that I've created. Now, if I actually show you those ROI scripts, this right here is my new idea script, which is the one that looks like this. And basically, you can find these on my code as well if you want to use them for some reason. I don't know why you would want to. basically just declares some doc types in an array and then through the use of several functions defines things that it needs to do and then it feeds those functions as options to roy. It's it's actually fairly easy to do. I do I did realize that I created the wrong shebang up here. It works but it this should really be slash user bin and bash like that. But anyways, that's the basic idea behind the new idea script. And the same thing is going to be for the notes app or the notes script here. It's basically the same thing. Look at that. I'm so used to using the same the that old shebang. There we go. I've saved it. Anyways, you can see that kind of that this just has two directories where it's going to save things. If it's if those directories don't exist, it makes them and then it feeds it into ROI and then it just it's just a a couple of her docs basically to create those files if they need to be created or launches you into Emacs if they've already been created. So that's basically all this these two scripts are and they just launch Emacs with certain things. So it just feeds this here doc into the daily notes thing that it creates and then opens Emacs with that those contents. It's really that simple. They're fairly easy to create. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I stole the basic idea for these from Dro Tube years and years ago. He had Derek had scripts for Dmenu, I believe, at that time. I think he switched to to Roi now, but basically he had scripts for choosing bookmarks, for changing wallpapers, I think several other things that were all Dmenu stuff. I I just stole the basic outline for those which was just a a feed into ROI with a with a variable and then a giant case statement. It's just a big case statement. That's all that it is. So those are the two ways that that I create notes and then it's basically just all markdown for me. So one of the cool things about markdown is you can do anything with it. So if I wanted to create a headline, if I could spell headline, I could do that. If I wanted to create a link, I could do a link. You know, if I if I wanted to create a list, I could create a list. If if I wanted to create a image, I could do do an image and then just do the path to an image and it would actually make it look like an image kind of. It doesn't actually input the image, but still all of that stuff I kind of stole from my neoim config. I've done, as I said in my EMAC video a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago at this point, I have gone out of my way to make sure that my Emac is as much like Vim as possible. Now, I've brought all of the automation that I had with my NeoVim config over to Emacs. It's all here to create my notes and stuff like that. It's just really, really good. Now, if you're wondering, I'm a big mobile notes taker. The way I do that is with an application called Sync Thing and Quillpad. So sync thing is a way to synchronize folders. Basically, you have it running on both machines. It watches both folders and make sure they're exactly the same at all times. That it's fairly simple, although it can get kind of finicky if you're not very good at naming things sometimes. So, you have to kind of be cautious about that. But basically, what it does is it watches the folder here, watches the folder there, and then I have Quilpad on my Android phone. it will attach itself to the sync thing folder on my phone here and basically just keep those two things in sync and I can actually make notes inside of Quilpad. Now, I don't know if you guys are actually going to be able to see this or not. Probably not any of the words, but that's basically what QuilPad looks like. You can probably look that up. It it it's basically Google Keep, but it's open source and allows you to choose the contents and directory of your notes. So you can just basically put them wherever you want. So it's actually kind of cool. That's my process for taking notes at the moment. And Emacs has slotted right in. I was using Obsidian for a little while, but Emac just works for me really, really well. And Vim would have as well. I can't say that Emacs is better than Vim in that way. But now that I'm here, it works really good. So that's my general process for taking notes. Again, if you want to see the actual Emacs config for this, you can go to my codeg. And if you're interested in me walking through my Emacs config, you can request that down in the comment section below. I'll see how many people are actually interested in that. It is a mess of ultimate proportions. So, we'll see how that happens. Anyways, if you have comments on this, comments in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Massadon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com/linixcast if you do so or you support me here on YouTube with the YouTube membership. You can get an exclusive weekly podcast that I put out for my patrons. Basically, it's just me sitting in front of my microphone for about 10 15 minutes just rambling on about nonsense. If that's something that really interests you, you can support me on those two platforms. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So, thank you so very, very very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are amazing. If you want to get merch to support the channel, you can find hats like this one here on my store, that's shop.thedcast.org. You can also find other things, other hats, t-shirts, backpacks, desk mats, all sorts of stuff. Shop.cast.org. Thanks everybody for watching. Hope you have a wonderful day and I will see you next time.

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