1 Introduction

Org is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, and doing project planning with a fast and effective plain-text system. It is also an authoring and publishing system, and it supports working with source code for literal programming and reproducible research.

This document is a much compressed derivative of the comprehensive Org mode manual. It contains all basic features and commands, along with important hints for customization. It is intended for beginners who would shy back from a 200 pages manual because of sheer size.

Installation

Important: If you are using a version of Org that is part of the Emacs distribution, please skip this section and go directly to Activation.

If you have downloaded Org from the web, either as a distribution ‘.zip’ or ‘.tar’ file, or as a Git archive, it is best to run it directly from the distribution directory. You need to add the ‘lisp/’ subdirectories to the Emacs load path. To do this, add the following line to your Emacs init file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/to/orgdir/lisp")

If you have been using git or a tar ball to get Org, you need to run the following command to generate autoload information.

make autoloads

Activation

Add the following lines to your Emacs init file to define global keys for three commands that are useful in any Emacs buffer, not just Org buffers. Please choose suitable keys yourself.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c l") #'org-store-link)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c a") #'org-agenda)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") #'org-capture)

Files with extension ‘.org’ will be put into Org mode automatically.

Feedback

If you find problems with Org, or if you have questions, remarks, or ideas about it, please mail to the Org mailing list . For information on how to submit bug reports, see the main manual.