If you follow the Emacs scene, you’ve probably seen some references to Bastien Guerry’s post on Org-mode Features You May Not Know. There’s been several tweets about it and, of course, Sacha covered it in her Weekly Emacs News. If you haven’t already seen it and you’re an Org user you should definitely take a look. There are a lot of useful tips that, as Guerry says, you may not know.

It doesn’t make any sense for me to repeat his list of tips but I do want to mention three that I found especially useful. Two of them I didn’t know before so I found them especially helpful. The first is that if you have speed keys enabled ( setq org-use-speed-commands t ), and the cursor is at the beginning of a headline, you can narrow to the headline’s subtree by typing s . I’ve already used this a couple of times and it really is useful, especially when you’re dealing with headlines that have nearly identical data.

The second tip I didn’t know about was applying filters to the agenda. If you have the an agenda up and want to look at only certain entries—say to save them to another file—you can type = and a regular expression to see only those entries that satisfy the regex. Another = or a | clears the filter.

Finally, there’s timestamped lists. I first learned about this in one of Rainer König’s videos in his OrgMode tutorial series. The idea is that you can make a list with each entry having a relative timestamp. That’s perfect for taking notes about a lecture or video where you want to refer to specific parts of the lecture or video. You start the list with Ctrl + c Ctrl + x - and new entries with the usual Meta + Return .

There are several other use tips in Guerry’s post so be sure to check it out if you’re an Org user. Some you may have no use for, some you may already know, but others may be both new and useful to you. Definitely recommended.