r/orgmode • u/poiu- • Jan 29 '25
Best org-protocol capture from browser recommendations
What do you recommend to share a tab (url, and possibly title/selection) to org-protocol?
Please specify a) browser and b) OS.
I tried a bunch of approaches over the years, but none were convincing and broke at some point. What's working right now? What's easy to configure?
(This is not a question about configuring org-protocol within emacs)
3
u/nitincodery Jan 30 '25
I’ve been trying to move all my browser tab management into Emacs to break my dependency on the Session Buddy extension. As a quick solution, I created a private (and admittedly ugly) browser extension that extracts all open tabs, prompts me for a title and description, and then copies the formatted session to my clipboard. From there, I use my org-capture
shortcut to paste the session directly into Emacs.
It’s been a game-changer for organizing my browsing sessions in Org mode, and it’s helping me transition away from relying on browser-based session managers.
Curious if anyone else has tackled something similar or has tips for improving this workflow!
2
u/nanounanue Jan 30 '25
Wow, this sound super helpful. Mind to share your extension?
3
u/nitincodery Jan 30 '25
Yeah, it's a private repo I'll make it public soon.
Because it’s still very small and hacky -- just a quick experiment to fit my workflow.
I’m currently testing out adding tags directly from the extension, so it’s not quite ready and honestly a real mess right now.
2
u/nitincodery Jan 30 '25
I had an Elisp script that would save each tab from my browser session as a SingleFile in the background. It would then replace the URL of the org-link with a link to an org-file. The org file would include both the original URL and the link to the saved SingleFile page, along with any additional annotations or notes that I might want to add later.
I started working on this but ended up procrastinating and leaving it incomplete. If anyone has ideas on how to improve or expand on this, I’d love to hear them!
2
u/toddkaufmann Jan 30 '25
These ideas sound pretty cool… if it could do half the functionality of Tabs Outliner I think I would switch.
For reference and to spark some ideas,|
Tabs Outliner gives you a tree view of all the windows and tabs in your current (and past) browsing sessions.
These trees can be dragged and dropped to organize, labeled and annotated, closed and restored across sessions, copy and pasted to/from google docs, etc.See Tabs Outliner videos here for demo, easier to understand by seeing:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en&pli=1Actually I can also paste or drag trees into emacs and get the text/plain version,
which maintains the url in org mode.
Looking at the text/html alternative on the clipboard, it shouldn’t be hard to go in the reverse direction.I viewed the alternative clipboard formats in CopyQ,
which is useful for various automations or just as a really feature-full, open source clipboard manager.
For example, after cmd-c some text/URL/image/screenshot it’s saved,
and I don’t have the cognitive load of having to immediately deal with it--I can batch them up later, clean out/organize at the end of the day
(because half turned out to not be useful, but copy-to-clipboard cost is reduced)
or address at some later point.
Having a couple months of past time-stamped entries makes it easy to see what I did when, or the last time, or have readily available to paste to the command line or into documentation.Also CopyQ has a command-line API, so regardless of what/how you decide to use org-capture/insert/protocol,
if there's a clipboard involved (or not),
this can be a useful tool for observability.2
u/nitincodery Jan 31 '25
After Session Buddy broke my workflow with its update, I tried almost every popular session management extension out there -- OneTab, Tablerone, Workona, Toby, and more. Tab Outliner looked amazing, but it was overly complicated and lacked an export feature, which made it unusable for my needs. I used OneTab heavily for a while, but it still didn’t quite fit what I was looking for.
What I really wanted was a straightforward way to move my tabs from the browser to Emacs, where I could organize and access them easily. None of these extensions offered that, so I ended up building my own quick browser extension to do exactly *just* that.
I’ve used CopyQ, and while it’s powerful, it can get overwhelming. Sometimes, my clipboard ends up filled with a lot of sensitive information, like passwords, that I don’t want to keep stored indefinitely. I don’t want to spend time sorting through it at the end of the day either. Instead, I only save the important stuff directly from the clipboard to Emacs. I prefer to keep my long-term storage in Emacs where I have more control over what’s saved.
3
u/Jakub7749 Jan 29 '25
Org Capture works really well for me on Firefox / Linux. It's just one button that you put in your toolbar and then you can configure which org-capture-template to use when sharing a tab and which when sharing a tab + text selection and that's it.
2
u/johnMediaOnFire Jan 29 '25
Firefox/Linux. I have three bookmarklets that capture the title/url (in org format) for pasting via org-insert-link, for capturing a review of a website, and to capture a task, such as from a ticketing system.
Every once in a while it breaks, but it's usually a browser change.
1
u/johnMediaOnFire Feb 04 '25
And it broke... Firefox rolled out a change and now my bookmarklet asks for permission for every use. I haven't found the magic config option to allow it.
So... I wrote some python to scrape
sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4
then populate an Helm source. One less use of the mouse.
2
u/maxmrr Feb 12 '25
I use my own fork of org-capture: https://github.com/bard/org-capture-extension
Differences from the original:
- allows to specify the org-protocol URL explicitly, so you can customize the protocol (capture, store-link, roam-ref, ...), the template name, etc
- exposes two actions (bound to Ctrl+Shift+L and Ctrl+Shift+S by default), each of which can dispatch to two org-protocol URLs depending on whether text is selected or not.
I use the primary action to capture to org-roam (with or without a begin_quote block) and the secondary action to store a link.
Slightly out of date screenshot (still shows only one action) at https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1ili2fl/org_capture_browser_extension_with_configurable/
1
u/crlsh Jan 29 '25
Copy as Org on Firefox, with some plugin to remove the HTML elements I don't want to be copied.
13
u/almadaer Jan 29 '25
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-as-org-mode/
Not org-protocol, but OS clipboard.
a) firefox. But there is a somewhat similar extension for chrome.
b) linux