Capturing and Refiling Notes

The following post is part of my new Emacs Writing Setup. You can find the complete setup here on GitHub: https://github.com/ballantony/emacs-writing

Capturing Notes

Like any writer I’m always capturing ideas. I used to carry a notebook everywhere, now I capture ideas on my phone using either orgzly or Evernote.

When working in Emacs I use org-capture.

GTD means capturing ideas quickly. I used to have templates to capture to different locations, I realised that this was an unnecessary step. Now I either capture everything as a TODO, either directly to my gtd file, or directly to the story file I’m currently working on.

As org-capture requires you to select a template I wrote the following two functions. The first calls org-capture with the ’t’ template preselected, the second does the same but uses let* to change org-capture-templates to the current buffer for the current capture only.

(defun tb/capture ()
    "Capture to do without options"
    (interactive)
    (org-capture nil "t"))

  (defun tb/capture-to-this-buffer ()
    "Capture note to this buffer"
    (interactive)
    (cond  ((not  (eq major-mode 'org-mode))
            (message "Can't capture to non org-mode buffer"))
           (t
            (let* ((this-file buffer-file-name)
                   (org-capture-templates
                    `(("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline ,this-file "Captured")
                       "** TODO %?"))))
              (org-capture)))))

2. Refiling Notes

org-refile makes it easy to refile notes, particularly with a completion system like Vertico. On Doom Emacs this means hitting SPC m r r