Remembering with org-mode and Ubiquity

Yesterday evening I published my second set of Ubiquity commands which provide a Ubiquity interface between Firefox and Emacs — specifically org-mode — using org-protocol . Ubiquity is an experimental extension from Mozilla Labs that lets you interact with the browser by giving it short, plain text commands. For example, “share” to post a bookmark to Delicious, or “map” to open a map of the selected address.

Org-Mode is an Emacs mode that can be used to keep track of notes, agendas and task lists. I use it to maintain my task list for various projects and take notes when I’m in a meeting. I really like that while it’s an outline editor at heart, it lets me write lots of text and go back later and figure out what’s actually actionable, as opposed to maintaining separate notes and task lists. org-protocol is included in recent releases and lets you launch an instance of emacsclient with some additional information (i.e., the URL and title of a web page, etc) and take some action on it. One of the built in “protocols” is sending that information to remember mode , which org-mode augments .

The main command is simply remember. Invoking it will send the current URL and document title to org-mode’s Remember buffer. You can optionally type a note or select text in the page to be captured along with the link.

Once you’re in the buffer you can make any changes needed and then simply C-c C-c to save the note, or C-1 C-c C-c to interactively file the note someplace else. I’m using this command to quickly store links with some notes to project files. I hope this will be particularly useful when I run across something for a project I’m not actually able to spend time on at the moment.

Note that before using the commands you need to configure Firefox to understand org-protocol:// links, and need to configure a remember template . The template I use looks like:

(?w "* %?\n\n Source: %u, %c\n\n %i" nil "Notes") This store the information in the Notes section of my org-default-notes-file and positions the cursor ready to type a heading.

To install, visit the command page and click _“Subscribe”_in the upper right hand corner when prompted (this assumes you have Ubiquity already installed). You can find the Javascript source on gitorious ; I’ll be adding my RDFa commands to that repository as well.