Re: What are Emacs best uses?

[W. Greenhouse]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas Shannon <tshanno@bearingthenews.com> writes:

> wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:
>
>>> Is it a good calendar?  Can you easily collaborate with colleagues who
>>> use Google Calendar?
>>
>> I find Org's agenda combined with the Emacs calendar to be very
>> effective.  In the past, it was easier to use Emacs to collaborate with
>> GCal users, because there are several Elisp libraries to interface with
>> the standard iCal API; today this has become more difficult because
>> Google has discontinued its iCal support.  The elimination of all
>> third-party Google Calendar clients, the better to attract eyeballs to
>> the web interface, cannot be far behind.
>>
>> My solution for the moment is to use my phone for any Google Calendar
>> stuff (and other non-free API junk).  The phone's calendar shows both
>> GCal events with others and my private MobileOrg calendare events.
>
> Thank you for this answer which caught me attention.  I have thus far
> resisted org mode for a few reasons one of which is that I have my own
> system for keeping a diary and journal and I like using it.  However, I
> *would* like to be able to view my diary on my iPhone.  Its not an
> org-mode file per se.  Just a regular text file (actually a LaTeX file).
> Can mobileorg allow me to work with it?

I don't think you can use MobileOrg in its current form to deal with
your .tex diary.  MobileOrg takes a repository of .org files which you
provide to a mobile somehow (by local storage, by WebDav or SSH, etc.),
lets you edit them on the mobile, and synchronizes those changes back to
Org.  So it needs an existing hierarchy of .org files and it needs to
parse those to generate TODO and calendar events.

A calendar in LaTeX might be more suitable for the "hipster PDA"
strategy: print out a week or so at a time and fold it up into a jacket
pocket or notebook.  Emacs can help you do this too, and in fact the
calendar/diary has some pre-built LaTeX layouts that are suitable for
this.  See (info "(emacs) Writing Calendar Files") for some info on the
`cal-tex' library which does this.

--
W. Greenhouse
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