Taking notes on a computer can be challenging,
especially if you compare computer notes
with handwritten notes. When you're handwriting,
you don't focus as much on taking those notes.
Well, you don't focus as much on *how* you take the notes,
you more so focus on what you're taking.
You don't get that same experience
if you're writing your notes on a computer.
When writing notes on a computer,
you mostly focus on typing or alignment.
Those are things that are kind of solved already
by certain software such as Org Mode,
which is fantastic when it comes to note-taking,
but I still believe it could be much better.
That's why I've developed the package called Lectorg.
It's a collection of scripts and snippets which allow you
to improve your note-taking experience on the computer,
of course, making you more focused on the subject
rather than the process of taking notes.
So why use Emacs? Well, again,
if compared with other software,
it has a lot more customizability
and it can also unify pretty much anything you need
in student life or work life into one place.
The problems that Lectorg solves are kind of,
as I mentioned, already solved partially
by Org Mode itself.
What I've done is simply make a bunch of additions
to Org Mode through an external package,
but I've also developed other sub-modules,
one of them being HBH, which allows me
to easily plan out my days HBH, hour by hour,
therefore I can plan out my days on an hourly basis
practically. But I've also built something called Reorg
which, for those of you that are familiar
with the Remarkable tablet, allows you
to integrate notes from your Remarkable into Emacs--
into your Org Mode notes basically.
Now I believe there's already another talk on integrating
handwritten notes into Emacs,
so I won't get too much into that.
So again, at the heart of Lectorg is Org Mode,
which for those of you that might not be familiar,
Org Mode is one of the best pieces of software
when it comes to basically capturing any sort of text,
managing that text, exporting it
into various different formats,
which is perfect for taking notes
because you can either export them,
take them on the go if you don't have access
to your computer all the time,
or you can share them with friends, which...
Well, that is somewhat self-explanatory
in how that can help you or others.
Now the ecosystem of Lectorg,
it's a bit chaotic as of right now. It's a package itself,
Lectorg.el, which also partially relies on
a collection of Python scripts
as I didn't have that much time
to develop the software strictly in Elisp,
but it still gets the job done,
and I believe that there is no speed hindrance.
Now to further improve Lectorg,
I'd love to ask for your help
if you have encountered any sort of issue
when it comes to note-taking or academics in general,
I would love to integrate your solution
(or if you don't have one, we can come up with one)
into Lectorg. Also, if anyone would be willing
to transcribe those Python scripts
into a more Lisp approach, then that'd be fabulous.
So let's look at how Lectorg works in practice.
We'll look at two examples,
one of taking notes for math
and the other for business, I believe.
Now I have to mention that all of the things
that I do in that example
do not cover all the functions and features of Lectorg.
There is decent documentation on the Lectorg GitLab page,
so do check that out for further reference.
For our first example, we're going to start off
with taking notes for statistics. Now what I'm doing here
is opening Lectorg Hub, which allows me
to associate certain resources with this particular course.
Here, I've opened the book which I have associated
with this course, and I'm going to go ahead
and start taking some notes
on the cumulative distribution function here.
Now what OrgMode allows you to do
is integrate LaTeX into regular text quite easily,
preview it, and then later export it.
Now here we can see the first usage of a snippet !m,
which inserts a block for entering a LaTeX equation.
What I'm trying to do here
is take a screenshot of the figures in the book,
which is done with org-download (not a part of Lectorg,
but a very useful tool). Now that is it for math.
Let's look at something a bit different.
We're going to take a look at business,
more specifically, taking notes on the product lifecycle.
Here on the left, I have certain notes from class
which are not complete.
As you can see at the top, there's a comment
also done using Lectorg which puts this file into a TODO
so that I can get back to it whenever I want
or schedule this TODO.
Now I'm taking notes on a video lecture,
which I've opened, again, through Lectorg hub.
As you can see right now, I'm inserting
another snippet for Plantuml,
which immediately exports it to a file,
and again I'm going to be using org-download here
to insert another figure at the top.
I hope this demonstration was useful.
Once again, it did not demonstrate everything.
You can find more on GitLab.
I hope some of you might consider using Lectorg
in your academic life or perhaps even
in some areas of business. I believe that is
everything I have to demonstrate for today.
Thank you for listening to this talk,
have a nice rest of the day.