Emacs org-mode Tutorial

Was amazed by the diagrams. Then the author says the source - http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/ !!

Now - does anyone know how we can create those diagrams from state flows? e.g.

    a -> b;
    a -> c;
    c -> b;

becomes

   /---\   /---\
   | b |<--| c |
   \---/   \---/
     ^       ^
     | /---\ |
     +-| a |-+
       \---/

I remember there being a perl library for it. Are there any other nice authoring mechanisms that don't involve intricate text crafting?

If you are also interested in GTD, org-mode can help: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.h...

Here is Charles Cave's older article, which seems simpler: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html

I end up just using org-mode as a todo list/scratchpad.

Wow! That is incredibly detailed and seems like a good system but sadly I gave emacs a try and just couldn't get into it. As of right now I just keep some plaintext files, one with a TODO list, another thats an brain dump of each day, and another for brainstorming projects. I am new to using vim (about 6 months now) and was wondering if anyone knew of a similar process or setup for managing projects and TODO lists?

org-mode is really useful, and you can start with a subset. I usually use

- headline hierarchies (lines starting with stars)

- itemized lists (starting with a dash) or with checkboxes (starting with '- [ ]')

- checkbox counters in headlines ('[/]' will be updated to show the percentage of complete checkbox items below that headline).

The DWIM keys C-c C-c, TAB and M-Return usually do the right thing.

The two main features I depend on in org-mode are the todo functionality (dates and agendas, mainly) and the easy hyperlinking. I find that incredibly useful for development notes.