moving to emacs org-mode

[This post should be read *before* the previous post. Can't even copy and paste in the right order! ]
I’m in the process of getting to grips with the emacs org-mode for my list management (I’m a fan of David Allens GTD stuff).

I have been using a Zaurus PDA for 2 1/2 years (Psions before that), and found the excellent IQnotes was pretty good for what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a pain to have to type in things which came through on email etc, and I found myself refraining from moving from the laptop to the PDA to enter something. In fact, sometimes I would write it in a post-it and stick that on the PDA case, with the aim of adding it later that day! It wasn’t seamless enough I suppose.

I also use a laptop running Suse (9.3 at present) and have been a UNIX user since around 1986, using emacs for all my basic text processing and mail reading (with MH and mh-e). Anyway, after finding out about the 43 folders site http://www.43folders.com/ I saw some posts about using emacs and planner mode for GTD. I loaded it up, but it didn’t seem as if it would suit me, so kept searching, and found org-mode (which is basically a souped up outline-mode which most emacs users will be familiar with). Org-mode, at the moment, looks as if it does what I want.

I dumped my Zaurus iqnotes XML file into my laptop at the weekend, converted it to html, loaded the html up into freemind, and then used a utility that comes with freemind to convert from freemind to outline-mode. A bit of editing, and I had all my lists in emacs, which is up all day, every day with me. (I suppose I could have hacked the XSL script to go to outline mode, but I didn’t have the XSL ref book at home).

So, we shall see how things go. I’m using the lists *much* more now that they are in another emacs window to the right of my emacs mail window.