Revisiting Abrams’ Capture Techniques

A year ago, I wrote about Howard Abrams’ post on Capturing Content for Emacs. I just saw a current reference to the post and reread it. It’s a really great article and worth mentioning again in case you missed it.

The basic idea is to make capturing data and inserting it into the currently clocked in task as effortless as possible. Abrams starts with some simple templates that show how to add a capture to the currently clocked in task and then moves on to adding data directly from the system clipboard to the current task. He even shows how to move selected text in an Emacs buffer to the current task.

All of that uses just the normal capture template mechanisms built into Org-mode. What I really liked was how he arranged to move data from the browser or other apps into the current task. One example is a simple shell script that you can put at the end of a pipeline to capture the output from the rest of the pipeline and import it into your current task.

He also considers capturing text and HTML preserving the necessary formatting and changing (HTML) links into Org links. He shows how to do it for macOS and Linux.

If you haven’t already read his post or you’ve forgotten the details, you really should take a look. There are a lot of great tricks that can help reduce friction in your workflow.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.