Notes-mode, the minutiae, and some other good stuff.
Moving between notes entries and around the hierarchy is fairly common, so there are some accelerators.
notes-goto-index-entry
).
notes-follow-next-link
and notes-follow-prev-link
).
These functions follow the links in the note,
if they're defined.
If not,
they look through the index file.
This approach usually works,
but will fail if there are multiple new entries created
with the given subject
between when the index is recomputed.
notes-w3-follow-link
),
a keyboard equivalent of S-mouse-2.
notes-beginning-of-defun
and notes-end-of-defun
).
current-url-as-kill
).
To link two entries, go to the target,
grab its URL with C-c C-k,
go to where you want to make the link,
and yank the URL with C-y.
Notes mode supports imenu,
if you have it bound to something
(I use (global-set-key [down-mouse-3] 'imenu)
).
It's often helpful to look at all
entries for a given subject
C-c C-s
collects all entries with the subject of the current
entry in a new buffer
(notes-summarize-subject
).
Notes occasionally contain private material. While Unix has strong services for file protection (compared to other, say, more wide-selling operating systems), in many systems root passwords are shared, while other systems are vulnerable to physical compromise. In such systems, properly used encryption is the best approach to security.
Notes-mode encryption is based Phill Zimmerman's PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) (see `http://www.mantis.co.uk/pgp/pgp.html') and either with Rick Campbell's emacs interface, PAM (PGP Augmented Messaging) (from `ftp://h.gp.cs.cmu.edu/usr/rfb/pam/') (note that as of January 1997, PAM is no longer at this ftp site and appears to not be publically available), or LoPresti and Choi's mailcrypt (from `http://cag-www.lcs.mit.edu/mailcrypt/').
notes-encrypt-note
).
By default this function encrypts the whole entry.
With a prefix argument,
only the part from the point to the end of the entry is encrypted.
notes-decrypt-note
).
By default notes-mode determines your public key by looking
up your user-full-name
in your PGP keyring.
You can override this default by setting
notes-encryption-key-id
to the desired key-id.
There are a number of conventions which can make notes-mode easier to use. These conventions are a matter of personal taste, of course. Do what works for you.
First, I find it helpful to keep the date of each notes-file at the top of the file. This makes the file self-identifying if the filename is lost.
Second, I find it useful to have the first entry of each file have the same subject (perhaps "Today"). This entry then links all notes together, making it easy to go to yesterday and tomorrow. I keep a to-do list on this entry, bringing the list forward each day.
A third useful convention is to keep an entry with the name based on the day of the week in each file. Analogous to "Today", this entry links together weeks.
Notes-mode supports these conventions. When you make a new notes-file in emacs, notes-mode searches for the preceding file. If it follows any of these conventions, the new file is initialized appropriately. Currently the approach to do this process (in the program `mknew') is fairly sensitive, so it may not work in all cases. In particular, the date convention works only on for English-language dates. (If you use notes-mode with a non-English language, let me know and I'll work with you to fix this limitation.)
If you find other helpful conventions, please let me know. Modifications to `mknew' to implement new conventions are also invited.
Only two features of notes index mode haven't yet been described.
First,
you can open any notes-file based on date
with notes-index-link
,
normally bound to o.
Second, you can get a subject-summary with C-c C-s (see section Subject summary). The subject defaults to that of the current index line.
Several aspects of notes mode are particularly visible to the user. Because I'm not a fascist, a user can change most of these.
Preferences are specified in `~/.notesrc'. This file lists things to change:
# lines beginning with a hash are comments dir: ~/NOTES int_form: %Y%m
Currently, two things can be changed:
dir
int_form
strftime(3)
formatting is allowed.
The subset of strftime(3)
supported in int_form
is:
%Y
%y
%m
%d
In addition to `.notesrc', there are a number of emacs-specific variables. These variables are documented in the file `notes-variables.el'.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.