This is my contribution to the Emacs Carnival 2025-07: Writing Experience. For me the experience of writing in Emacs is a frequent, ever evolving, largely in org-mode, magical experience that has become critical for the way I operate. I am a vim convert, but I never had to give up the lovely editing experience and familiar key bindings thanks to Spacemacs and evil-mode. I have been trying to develop muscle memory for avy but I am not there yet.
Org-mode is my exocortex, second brain, second mind, mind palace, pensive, personal knowledge management system, and apocrypha. It’s very flexible and the features I use as well as how I organize my files continues to change so I collected things here to document how I do things in 2024, I did this in 2023 as well1. No, my Emacs org-mode configuration is not published. However, if you have some question, just reach out.
I’ve been pretty much living in org-mode for 6 or 7 years now1. It’s my exocortex, second brain, second mind, mind palace, pensive, and personal knowledge management system2. The features and tools I use as well as how I organize my files has changed quite a bit over this period of time and I thought it would be nice give myself (and anyone else who cares) a reference of what it was like in 2023 so here it is.
I think I started getting interested in org-mode in 20071. I definitely was making serious attempts to integrate it into my workflow by 2010. By 2016 it became my primary tool. By primary tool, I mean that most of my daily work is either done from within or at least I’ve probably written down something about what I’ve done in org-mode. Early on, maybe 2009 I found Bernt Hansens Organize you life in plain text!
It's easy to export an org document to html and get a table of contents, but sometimes it's nice to have a table of contents inside of an org-mode file. The [[https://github.com/snosov1/toc-org][toc-org]] package makes this automatic. Simply tag a headline with :TOC: and the headline will auto fill an index with all following headlines. <img src="" alt="" width="100%"/>
This weekend Neil Watson asked if I could share how I use org-mode with Spacemacs. @cmdln_ Care to share with an Emacs illiterate how you got Spacemacs and Org-mode to work together? – @neil_h_watson First of all, I spend most of my time in a terminal, and vim is ingrained in my muscle memory any time I need to edit a file. While Vim is my goto editor I consider myself just a novice Vim user.
Org-mode is my exocortex, second brain, second mind, mind palace, pensive, personal knowledge management system, and apocrypha. It’s very flexible and the features I use as well as how I organize my files continues to change so I collected things here to document how I do things. I try to snapshot this periodically, so you might be interested in checking out one of those: [How I org in 2023](https://cmdln.org/2023/03/25/how-i-org-in-2023/) [How I org in 2024](https://cmdln.