Emacs, Evernote (through enscript.exe), and Org links

Posted: Mar 20, 2014 - Modified: Jun 12, 2019| emacs, org

I've given myself permission to

2014-03-11 Deciding how to spend time #time

with various technical ideas and prototypes every day. This means Emacs geekery is going to turn up on my blog more often. =) Here's a recent hack that I put together to make my weekly reviews a little easier.

I skim a lot of blog posts on my phone using the Feedly app. (See: How to read blogs efficiently with a feed reader.) I save the posts I want to follow up on or include in my weekly round-up. I have an If This Then That recipe that monitors my saved items and stashes them in Evernote with the roundup tag. If I come across other interesting pages while browsing on my computer, I use the Evernote Web Clipper to save those pages with the roundup tag as well.

In the past, I selected a range of notes to export from Evernote, saved them to a file, and used my sacha/evernote-extract-links-for-review function to extract the titles and URLs. I opened each of the pages with C-c C-o (org-open-at-point) to refresh my memory and follow up. I deleted lines that were no longer relevant. Since IFTTT had changed to rewriting the URLs instead of leaving the source URLs alone, I copied the original URLs and replaced the links that were in Org.

This is Emacs, though, and even that can be smoothened with a little scripting. Now I can use the code below to expand URLs and to open all the URLs in the region.

Link-related convenience functions

I picked this up from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AlexSchroederConfigOrientalibombus .

(defun kensanata/resolve-redirect (url)
  "Resolve shortened URL by launching `curl --head' and parsing the result."
  (let* ((curl (shell-command-to-string
                (format "curl --silent --head %s" url)))
         (location (when (and (string-match "\\`HTTP/1\.1 301" curl)
                              (string-match "^Location: \\(.*\\)" curl))
                     (match-string 1 curl))))
    (or location url)))

(defun sacha/resolve-urls-in-region (beg end)
  "Expand URLs between BEG and END."
  (interactive "r")
  (save-excursion
    (save-restriction
      (narrow-to-region beg end)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward org-bracket-link-regexp nil t)
        (replace-match (save-match-data (kensanata/resolve-redirect
                                         (match-string 1))) t t nil 1))
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward org-link-re-with-space nil t)
        (replace-match (save-match-data (kensanata/resolve-redirect
                                         (match-string 0))) t t nil)))))

(defun sacha/open-urls-in-region (beg end)
  "Open URLs between BEG and END."
  (interactive "r")
  (save-excursion
    (save-restriction
      (narrow-to-region beg end)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward org-plain-link-re nil t)
        (org-open-at-point)))))

Evernote-related extract

Evernote on Windows doesn't have the same kind of scripting capabilities that Evernote on the Mac has, but it turns out you can still do a fair bit of scripting with the enscript tool.

(defun sacha/evernote-export-and-extract (start-date end-date)
  "Extract notes created on or after START-DATE and before END-DATE."
  (let ((filename "c:/sacha/tmp/Evernote.enex"))
    (call-process 
     "c:/Program Files (x86)/Evernote/Evernote/enscript.exe"
     nil t t
     "exportNotes"
     "/q" (concat
           " tag:roundup"
           " created:" (replace-regexp-in-string "-" "" start-date)
           " -created:" (replace-regexp-in-string "-" "" end-date))
     "/f" filename)
    (sacha/evernote-extract-links-for-review filename)))

(defun sacha/evernote-extract-links-for-review (filename)
  "Extract note names and URLs from FILENAME.
     The file should be an ENEX export."
  (interactive (list (read-file-name "File: ")
                     (org-read-date)
                     (org-read-date)))
  (let (list)
    (with-temp-buffer
      (insert-file-contents filename)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward "<title>\\(.+?\\)</title>\\(.*?\n\\)*?.*?href=\"\\(.*?\\)\"" nil t)
        (setq list
              (cons
               (cons
                (match-string-no-properties 1)
                (match-string-no-properties 3)) list))))
    (setq list
          (mapconcat (lambda (x)
                       (concat "- [["
                               (kensanata/resolve-redirect (cdr x))
                               "][" (car x) "]]: ")) list "\n"))
          (if (called-interactively-p 'any)
              (insert list)
            list)))

Let's see how this new workflow goes. =) If you're curious, you can check out the rest of my weekly-review-related code in my Emacs configuration.