Archive: workflow

I have been an org-mode user for a decent amount of time (years? decades? What even is time these days?) Not quite the grandpa “back in my day” length of time that makes people roll their eyes and immediately go back to browsing Reddit on their phones, but I have done a decent amount of customization and adaptations in my workflow over time.

One issue I frequently ran into when integrating org-protocol into my workflow is that several configuration examples lying around the web simply did not work for me. Org-protocol seems to be finicky based on tool versions and system configurations.

This post is an attempt to outline how I use it on my system and to hopefully help anyone with similar problems to solve. It focuses on integrating org-protocol into a workflow along with Firefox and Mutt. Org-protocol obviously integrates with other tools as well, but I do not have experience with anything else at the moment … so here we are. This post is written with the assumption that the system has Emacs installed and that the reader has at least minimal familiarity with org-mode. It is also written from the perspective of a GNU/Linux system, so there may be some adjustments required for other types of environments.

I’ve been told that utilizing this functionality is terrible, bad practice, a mistake, contributes to climate change, etc. However, it fits into my workflow pretty well, and it might fit into yours as well. After all, it is implemented in at least two version control systems…so some people must find it useful, right?

I use both Mercurial and Git depending on the project, so I’ll briefly describe the usage for both, with references to more complete documentation at the end. While the implementation is different, in both cases there are essentially multiple working directories for a single repository.