remember: Introduction
2 Introduction
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Todo lists, schedules, phone databases... everything we use databases
for is really just a way to extend the power of our memory, to be able
to remember what our conscious mind may not currently have access to.
There are many different databases out there—and good ones—which this
mode is not trying to replace. Rather, it’s how that data gets there
that’s the question. Most of the time, we just want to say “Remember
so-and-so’s phone number, or that I have to buy dinner for the cats
tonight.” That’s the FACT. How it’s stored is really the computer’s
problem. But at this point in time, it’s most definitely also the
user’s problem, and sometimes so laboriously so that people just let
data slip, rather than expend the effort to record it.
“Remember” is a mode for remembering data. It uses whatever back-end
is appropriate to record and correlate the data, but its main intention
is to allow you to express as _little_ structure as possible up front.
If you later want to express more powerful relationships between your
data, or state assumptions that were at first too implicit to be
recognized, you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the
initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply
throwing the data at Emacs as possible.
Have you ever noticed that having a laptop to write on doesn’t
_actually_ increase the amount of quality material that you turn out, in
the long run? Perhaps it’s because the time we save electronically in
one way, we’re losing electronically in another; the tool should never
dominate one’s focus. As the mystic Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār wrote: “Be
occupied as little as possible with things of the outer world but much
with things of the inner world; then right action will overcome
inaction.”
If Emacs could become a more intelligent data store, where
brainstorming would focus on the _ideas_ involved—rather than the
structuring and format of those ideas, or having to stop your current
flow of work in order to record them—it would map much more closely to
how the mind (well, at least mine) works, and hence would eliminate that
very manual-ness which computers from the very beginning have been
championed as being able to reduce.
Info Catalog
remember: Preface
remember: Top
remember: Implementation