This post is about a posting by Marcin Borkowski (mbork) from a couple of weeks ago that I’ve had sitting in a browser tab since then. Sacha already covered it so I wasn’t going to replow that ground but I kept thinking that the day would come when I would need to know how to copy some Org mode text without including the link markup. So this post is sort of a note to myself but also to anyone else who missed seeing the original or its mention in Emacs News.
The basic idea is that you have some Org text that contains links and you want to copy it to some
inactive text where the links aren’t live. Rather than have the link appear as [[https://someplace.com][a link to some place]], you’d like them to appear simply as a link to some place.
This is Org mode and Emacs so of course there is a way. Org has the command org-copy-visible that does just what you want. It even has a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+c Ctrl+x v.
You’re probably not going to need this often but when you do, it can save a lot of tedious labor. That’s why I’m recording it here so that I can find it later when I need it.