In the nvALT and Emacs post I described an integration between nvAlt and Emacs using Deft for markdown notes. I the past year I have moved to using Deft for org notes rather than markdown notes. The nice thing about combining Deft with Org is that your notes are indexed and easy to find using Deft, but also retain all of the power of Org to orgainize and present information. For example typing decision boundary into deft quickly cuts down hundreds of org text notes to the handful that contain the words decision and boundary in them.

Deft also supports regular expression search mode to provide more precise searches (use C-c C-t to toggle search modes). Deft makes it easy to create new notes also, simply type a title and hit ctrl-return to create a new note with that title. See the UI in action in the animated gif below (image by Jason Blevins via Deft ). See the Documentation for other handy features.

Below I describe setting up Deft for emacs, and show my current customization's. Org also supports export to many different formats. In a future posts I will cover my setup for exporting notes to markdown documents, reveal presentations, and even mindmaps.

Installing Deft

Follow the instructions at Deft to install from source (usually the latest version this way) or use the Emacs package installer as shown below.

    M-x package-install deft

Configuring Deft

I prefer to use Deft for org files and not others (txt, md, etc), so that is reflected in my configuration below. Using this technique I converted the tab key into a hyper-key (C-M-S-s), so with the key mapping below Deft can be called up with tab-d This technique is nice, because the tab key still works for tabbing, but when held down it acts like an additional modifier key that can be use in emacs key bindings.

    (require 'deft)
    (setq deft-default-extension "org")
    (setq deft-extensions '("org"))
    (setq deft-directory "~/org")
    (setq deft-recursive t)
    (setq deft-use-filename-as-title nil)
    (setq deft-use-filter-string-for-filename t)
    (setq deft-file-naming-rules '((noslash . "-")
                                   (nospace . "-")
                                   (case-fn . downcase)))
    (setq deft-text-mode 'org-mode)
    (global-set-key (kbd "C-M-S-s-d") 'deft)
    (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-g") 'deft-find-file)