Re: [emacs-humanities] Emacs "Projects" management?

[Christian Tietze]

Alan Davis <alan3davis@gmail.com> writes:

> I would like to ask about how others, in the "emacs-humanities"
> community, use such project managers for various kinds of projects (in
> the loose sense), and whether such as "projectile" have been useful,
> and what modifications were useful.

I've notices quite a few replies focusing on the technical aspects of
using `projectile` to some extent. Let me focus on the knowledge worker
level.

I personally stick to David Allen's definition of "project" as anything
that has multiple steps that need to be completed in sequence. Now
that's easy to do in org-mode, you can nest TODO headings below another
heading, and voila, there's your project. (Same with checkboxes,
really.)

For software development, I have project headings like "My App v1.2.3"
and group stuff I want/need to prepare for the release.

For writing, I have headings for a book manuscript of a friend (Sascha
at zettelkasten.de). I've proof-read and edited all of the
twenty-something chapters. Each chapter had 1 TODO org heading, nested
below a level 1 heading for the manuscript. Short example with fantasy
numbers and only 3 subheadings:

* Zettelkasten Manuscript v2 [26/26]
** DONE 0100 Introduction
** DONE 4200 Processing notes
- some remarks on the chapter I want to have ready later when talking
  about the book with Sascha
** DONE 4300 Tables and structures

The numbers denote manuscript piece numbers. The book is spread across
multiple files, and each file starts with a number from 0000 to 9999.
Chapters are 0100, 0200, ... and this leaves room to split up the
chapter into sections in the lowest digits (0110, 0120, ...). This also
affects the final sort order of the book. It enables moving sections
around in the rough draft phase easily.

Where the manuscript files live? Not inside org. I have a folder,
~/Pending, where all current projects are listed (archived or abandoned
or want-to-pursue-later projects are elsewhere). Inside that folder, I
might have one for a writing project or websites, like:

~/Pending/ contains e.g.:
~/Pending/zettelkasten.de/{pdfs|illustrations|...}  -- website stuff
~/Pending/2021-01 Moonlander/videos  -- keyboard videos
~/Pending/org/...  -- all my personal productivity org files

Linking from my org files to project files via paths is simple.

I sync ~/Pending to my Nextcloud (I have a NAS and server behind me) and
can access important data from my tablet and mobile phone and web. The
mobile app beorg even syncs nicely with my org folder so I can access my
TODOs and a basic agenda.

Actual website code is in ~/Sites, actual app code in ~/Coding, but
project information, illustrations, history of important emails, texts
for websites, etc. are kept in ~/Pending while they are used, then
moved to ~/Documents/Archive eventually. This stuff is backed up, but
I don't have easy cloud access to it anymore after that.

I do use projectile, and git, for my website and app code. But for my
org files I rely on Nextcloud version history (Dropbox has the same)
because I don't manually want to do 'commits'; I save the files a
bazillion times per day, and either I get per-save rollbacks thorugh
versioning, or daily backups automatically. Automated git would not
provide anything on top of that for me.

Hope that's somewhat helpful?

----
Sent from Bielefeld, Germany <3
https://christiantietze.de