Was amazed by the diagrams. Then the author says the source - http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/ !!

Now - does anyone know how we can create those diagrams from state flows? e.g.

    a -> b;
    a -> c;
    c -> b;

becomes

   /---\   /---\
   | b |<--| c |
   \---/   \---/
     ^       ^
     | /---\ |
     +-| a |-+
       \---/

I remember there being a perl library for it. Are there any other nice authoring mechanisms that don't involve intricate text crafting?

the graphviz suite (in particular dot) is pretty easy to use and produces decent results

If you are also interested in GTD, org-mode can help: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.h...

Here is Charles Cave's older article, which seems simpler: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html

I end up just using org-mode as a todo list/scratchpad.

Wow! That is incredibly detailed and seems like a good system but sadly I gave emacs a try and just couldn't get into it. As of right now I just keep some plaintext files, one with a TODO list, another thats an brain dump of each day, and another for brainstorming projects. I am new to using vim (about 6 months now) and was wondering if anyone knew of a similar process or setup for managing projects and TODO lists?

Could you set aside just 15 minutes a day everyday (say, after lunch) for learning Emacs and give it another go? That is how I got into it. The effort will pay off big time.

He's being modest about it; but if you're just picking up emacs, check out kirubakaran's profile - I got a lot of out reading his .emacs file.

I found that a better way of getting into Emacs is learning Elisp and, afterward, reading the Elisp reference manual. Much better than slogging through a bunch of keyboard shortcuts hoping that one of them becomes muscle memory.

org-mode is really useful, and you can start with a subset. I usually use

- headline hierarchies (lines starting with stars)

- itemized lists (starting with a dash) or with checkboxes (starting with '- [ ]')

- checkbox counters in headlines ('[/]' will be updated to show the percentage of complete checkbox items below that headline).

The DWIM keys C-c C-c, TAB and M-Return usually do the right thing.

The two main features I depend on in org-mode are the todo functionality (dates and agendas, mainly) and the easy hyperlinking. I find that incredibly useful for development notes.