Remembering to Org and Planner

| emacs

Most of my notes are in Emacs Planner. Handy commands like M-x
remember help me quickly take notes and write down ideas, saving the
text to my blog.

While reading the manual for Org, another PIM for Emacs (yes, another
one!), I decided to give it a try. Org uses Remember, the same quick
note-taking module that Planner does. I wanted to set up Emacs so that
I could remember a note and have it go either to my Planner-based blog
or to my notes file.

M-x remember is a two-step procedure. First, Remember sets up the
buffer and inserts the annotation. After you write the note and press
C-c C-c, Remember passes the note’s contents to a handler function.
Because Planner and Org have incompatible annotation functions and
destinations, I needed to override both.

Here’s how I did that:

(defun sacha/remember-to-org ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((org-directory "~/path/to/my/orgfiles/")
        (org-default-notes-file "~/.notes")
        (remember-annotation-functions '(org-remember-annotation))
        (remember-mode-hook (cons 'org-remember-apply-template
                                  remember-mode-hook)))
    (remember)
    (set (make-variable-buffer-local 'remember-handler-functions)
         '(org-remember-handler))))
(global-unset-key [f9 ?o])
(global-set-key [f9 ?o ?r] 'sacha/remember-to-org)
(global-set-key [f9 ?r ?o] 'sacha/remember-to-org)

I’ve set up Remember to work with Planner by default:

(setq remember-handler-functions '(remember-planner-append))
(setq remember-annotation-functions planner-annotation-functions)
(global-set-key [f9 ?r ?p] 'remember)
(global-set-key [f9 ?p ?r] 'remember)
(global-set-key (kbd " r SPC") 'remember)

I’ve added plenty of keyboard shortcuts to see which ones feel the most natural.

I’m looking forward to playing around with this and seeing what works!

Random Emacs symbol: tty-color-define – Function: Specify a tty color by its NAME, terminal INDEX and RGB values.

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