Emacs is a powerful tool. A frequent habit of emacs user is to try to migrate everything they know and use inside emacs. Emacs Gnus or mu4e, both emacs mail clients, emacs org-mode, a GTD mode inside emacs—which is actually extremely powerful—, emacs calc, a calculator inside emacs etc… are all attempts in this line of conduct.

As an emacs user myself, I also tried these stuff. And it works really well.

As a matter of fact, I actually use it all day long. Let’s describe quickly how I use it to work.

Emacs Matters

I start emacs as I start my OS. I used to check mails with mu4e, but never really loved the UI. I check my agenda for the day, built with org-mode. I set up my main tasks for the day, putting some time-stamps on it.

Programming and documenting. At the same time.

I then open the README.org of the project I’m currently working on, which involves a lot of bash scripting, python and R. All these scripts are written inside the README.org, with comments and all written in org-mode. Scripts are written inside src blocks, and tangled to a src directory containing all my tangled files. I never ever edit a single tangled files. I always do it inside org-mode, so that I can describe my work, what I try to do, what I already did and what’s left to do at the end of the day. My workflow is thus entirely managed inside emacs. I can put TODO flags in different parts of the project, organise the src code in different header tree etc…

Org-mode to pdf

When the time comes to write a report, I write it inside org-mode. I use zotero to export my references to a .bib file somewhere on my computer. Org-ref is a mode to manage citations and references inside org-mode. I already wrote a 30 pages long report with figures, references, math and all inside org-mode. I export to latex, and use latexmk to export my report to pdf.

Emacs is great. Let’s all use emacs. ¹