Assorted Array

After a long break, I’ve recently started using notmuch again to manage my emails. While plain text / Emacs HTML rendering works well for 99% of the emails I read, there’s still a few that are just easier to read in a full fledged browser. I had a function I had previously written to make this process easier, letting me just hit a key to have the HTML part of the message opened in my browser, however it didn’t seem to be working.

A colleague recently shared some code to copy plain text Org Mode markup to the clipboard, such that the formatting would be properly represented when pasting in other applications. The idea is you can draft some text in Org (or another markup like Markdown) and then paste it into rich text fields in your web browser or other application. However, their solution used xclip, which wouldn’t work for me on a Mac. There are some solutions1, 2 that use pbcopy as an alternative, however I found that it didn’t work with Firefox or Slack. I could paste the formatted text into Chrome, but nothing would happen when I tried to paste in these other applications.

While there are some things I prefer in Chrome I try to use Firefox whenever possible as I think it’s important to have choices. However, we use Google Meet at my company and I’ve never gotten it to perform well in Firefox (I’m guessing it’s not one of Google’s top priorities). This means I have to copy the links to the meeting and navigate there myself in Chrome. Since I use Org Mode to manage my calendar I thought, why not hack browse-url to open Google Meet url’s in Chrome and save my self the trouble?

An overview of some techniques I use to manage my Emacs configuration with Org mode.