A side note. This is a rough translation of my original article sent a few years ago to “Magic of the black screen” competition. If you are jaunty masochist fascinated by use ‘n cry email readers, or you were just searching for something about white-tailed gnus and you found this article - sorry to dissapoint you - that’s definitely wrong place. On the other hand, if you value your time, simplicity and usability, and the only thing that comes to your mind when talking about GNU is GNU’s Not Unix, you’re welcomed to read further.

org-mode is undoubtedly one of the most versatile note-taking and planning tools I have ever encountered. It also ranks as my top choice for daily GTD practices. Recently, I discovered a small feature that enhances my experience with org-mode even further - notifications. Imagine you’ve just scheduled an incredibly important meeting with your girlfriend, and being a natural programmer, you’ve already made an entry in your org-mode planner. However, org-mode does not automatically alert you to upcoming events, making it easy to overlook them, especially when you are deep into your work, deciphering yet another Perl script…

Vanilla Emacs bookmarks are for lhamas. Real octopodes use bookmark+ which enhances well known bookmarking in the way you didn’t even imagine. As the wiki page states: Richer bookmarks. They record more. They are more accurate. Here are some key features available to us for free: Bookmark tagging: similar to Delicious, you can use tags for sorting and filtering your bookmarks. Usage statistics: sort and filter your bookmarks based on how frequently they are used.

Here’s a helpful tip I discovered while searching interactively (using C-s). If you want to see all occurrences of your current search term, press M-s o. This will open a new buffer listing all the relevant instances. You can also conveniently extend your search by selecting additional words with C-w. By using the sequence C-s C-w C-w M-s o, you can select two words starting from the current cursor position and view all their occurrences in the current buffer.

It may sound intimidating, but don’t worry - it’s not about killing this time. The term “kill ring” in Emacs refers to a list of text blocks that have been cut (or “killed”). That’s right! It involves multiple blocks of text that you can cut and paste. Emacs, as an exceptional text editor, allows you to maintain a history of what you have killed. Just be sure to close it before you start doing nasty things :)