remember

remember

[ UPDATE: I have cleaned up the code; it should work better now if you don't have an open emacsclient. I also removed the comments relating to that, as to not confuse people…]

The human brain is quite good at forgetting things. Often, this is a good thing. However, sometimes you might actually not want to forget. Things you need to do – 'Buy milk', 'Register for Helsinki City Run', or simply things that might be of interest, such as books, funny quotations, articles to check out, and so on.

Such thoughts should me jotted down immediately, without thinking too much. It's an essential part of productivity methods like GTD ('Getting Things Done'). The idea is that you capture ideas, thoughts, plans, etc. at the very moment they enter your mind.

Periodically, you go through all the things you gathered, and decide what to do with them. Maybe you need to take some action, maybe you only need to store it somewhere. Or maybe you can simply throw it away. The main point is that whenever something is in your mind that might be interesting later, make sure it's not lost.

You can of course carry a simple notebook around and that's not a bad idea at all. However, a large part of the information inflow is digitized, computerized, and it's not very convenient to copy interesting tidbits by hand from your notebook. Clearly, our almighty emacs should be able to help with this, or?

Indeed. The Emacs-way to capture dispersed information is called remember-mode. It allows you to quickly write down your thoughts, press C-c C-c and be done with it. The important thing is that is should be a mindless little exercise to save these things, and get on with your work, life.

I'll describe my use of remember-mode in combination with org-mode. There are many other things you can do with remember-mode; just read the manual or the cookbook; also see the great tutorial, and the remember-mode section in the org-mode-manual.

To integrate remember-mode with org-mode, add to your .emacs:

(org-remember-insinuate)

Now, the important thing is to have 'remember' available anywhere on your desktop, not just when using emacs – after all, valuable ideas might come up even when not using emacs, for example when browsing the web. Jack Moffit showed how to get little pop-up windows for remember on MacOS; inspired by that, here is my solution for Linux/X (this is an updated version):

;; you might also want to set:
;;   (setq org-agenda-skip-unavailable-files t)
;; so these warnings won't annoy the little remember-frame
;; also: I have noted infrequent problems when using ElScreen
;;  (the wrong frame might be chosen for Remember in about 10% of the cases)

(defun djcb-remember-frame ()
  "turn the current frame into a small popup frame for remember mode;
this is meant to be called with 
     emacsclient -c -e '(djcb-remember-frame)'"
  (modify-frame-parameters nil
    '( (name . "*Remember*") ;; must be same as in mode-hook below  
       (width .  80)
       (height . 10)
       (vertical-scroll-bars . nil)
       (menu-bar-lines . nil)
       (tool-bar-lines . nil)))
  (org-remember)
  (when (fboundp 'x-focus-frame) (x-focus-frame nil)) ;; X only....

  (delete-other-windows)) 

;; when we're in such a remember-frame, close it when done.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook
  (lambda()
    (define-key org-remember-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-c")
      '(lambda()(interactive)
         (let ((remember-frame-p 
                 (string= (frame-parameter nil 'name) "*Remember*")))
           (when remember-frame-p (make-frame-invisible))  ;; hide quickly

           (org-remember-finalize)
           (when remember-frame-p (delete-frame)))))))

The next step is to have some easy way to run this. I am using emacsclient and xbindkeys for that. In my ~/.xbindkeysrc I have:

# pop-up a remember window
"emacsclient -c -e '(make-remember-frame)'"
  control+shift+r

After this (and assuming a running emacs daemon), you can run remember-mode by pressing Control-Shift-r. Make it part of your routine; whenever an idea comes up, press Control-Shift-r, quickly jot down the thing on your mind, and press C-c C-c to save it for eternity. Review your notes periodically.

Finally, as mentioned, remember-mode can do quite a bit more than described here - especially when used in combination with org-mode. One interesting extension are templates, which are a way to create your notes in a structured way. For example, I have the following:

(setq org-remember-templates 
  '(("Clipboard" ?c "* %T %^{Description}\n %x"
      "~/remember.org" "Interesting")
     ("ToDo" ?t "* TODO %T %^{Summary}" 
       "~/remember.org" "Todo")))

Please refer to the manual for the exact syntax. Basically, this defines two templates; the first one will ask you for a description, and then add then insert the contents of the (X) clipboard under the 'Interesting'-header; the second insert a simple 'TODO'-entry under the 'Todo'-header.

Exempli gratia – suppose I have selected some text in my web-browser. Now, I push the key-binding we set up before: C-R (Control-Shift r). A small window pops up, asking me if I want to make a 'Clipboard' or a 'Todo' entry. I press c for a clipboard entry. I asks me for a description, which I provide; it dumps the contents of the clipboard in the entry. I then push C-c C-c to save and close the pop-up window.

All of the notes will be saved to a file ~/remember.org; you can customize this of course, and you can also move different kinds of today items to different files. Anyway, after a while, ~/remember.org might look somewhat like this:

* Interesting
** <2009-04-05 Sun 18:06> what is emacs?

  Emacs is a powerful, customizable, self-documenting, modeless text
  editor. Emacs contains special code editing features, a scripting language
  (elisp), and the capability to read mail, news, and more without leaving the
  editor.
** <2009-04-05 Sun 19:39> socrates
  The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to
  live. Which is better God only knows.
* Todo
** TODO <2009-04-05 Sun 18:12> buy milk & cookies

As you see, remember.org is just another org-mode-file, so all its bells and whistles are available. Periodically, you should go through this file and take necessary actions.

You could go further and develop complicated templates for capturing specific information, tagging it and so on. The various manuals give some examples. All I wanted to do here is to give a small taste of the power of remember-mode in combination with org-mode. The rest is up to your imagination…