org-cliplink

A simple command that takes a URL from the clipboard and inserts an org-mode link with a title of a page found by the URL into the current buffer.

This code was a part of my Emacs config almost a year. I decided to publish it as a separate package in case someone needs this feature too.

Usage

org-cliplink

Bind org-cliplink function to something. For example, put this line in your init file:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x p i") 'org-cliplink)

Then copy any http/https URL to the clipboard, switch to the Emacs window and hit C-x p i.

org-cliplink-capture

org-cliplink version for org-capture templates. Makes synchronous request. Returns the link instead of inserting it to the current buffer. Doesn’t support Basic Auth. Doesn’t support cURL transport.

Here is how it’s supposed to be used in org-capture-templates:

(setq org-capture-templates
   '(("K" "Cliplink capture task" entry (file "")
      "* TODO %(org-cliplink-capture) \n  SCHEDULED: %t\n" :empty-lines 1)))

Custom Transformers

You can actually customize how org-cliplink transforms and inserts url and title to the current buffer. To do that use org-cliplink-insert-transformed-title function. It takes the URL and a CALLBACK which is invoked when the title is retrieved.

For example, if you want to strip off Github - <description>: from the GitHub titles you can implement the following custom-org-cliplink function and use it instead of the original org-cliplink:

(defun custom-org-cliplink ()
  (interactive)
  (org-cliplink-insert-transformed-title
   (org-cliplink-clipboard-content)     ;take the URL from the CLIPBOARD
   (lambda (url title)
     (let* ((parsed-url (url-generic-parse-url url)) ;parse the url
            (clean-title
             (cond
              ;; if the host is github.com, cleanup the title
              ((string= (url-host parsed-url) "github.com")
               (replace-regexp-in-string "GitHub - .*: \\(.*\\)" "\\1" title))
              ;; otherwise keep the original title
              (t title))))
       ;; forward the title to the default org-cliplink transformer
       (org-cliplink-org-mode-link-transformer url clean-title)))))

Requirements

• Linux
• Emacs version 24.4+
• cURL 7.35.0+ (optional)

Windows

Windows is not officially supported until #35 is resolved.

• GnuTLS — if you use Emacs installation from the official GNU FTP server — ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ — you may simply download the latest version of GnuTLS from ftp://ftp.gnutls.org/gcrypt/gnutls/w32/ and copy the content of the downloaded archive to the emacs installation folder.

Bugs

bug

Development

1. open org-cliplink.el in Emacs;
2. change something;
3. M-x eval-buffer RET;
4. manual testing;
5. go to 3 until it’s done;

Automated testing

For automated testing you need to install Cask first.

To run unit tests:

$ cask # only once to download development dependencies
$ cask exec ert-runner

To run integration and unit tests together:

$ ./run-travis-ci.sh

This exact script is run on every push to org-cliplink GitHub repo on Travis CI (that’s why it’s called run-travis-ci.sh). This script starts up a testing web-server, executes integrations tests defined in *-integration-tests.el files and executes unit tests after that.

You can start the testing web-server standalone:

$ ./run-testing-server.py

It requires Python 2.7.6+. It will serve test-data/site folder on different ports with different features (like HTTPS, Gziped content, Basic Auth, etc.).

To stop the server just ^C it.

The automated testing stuff was tested only under Linux so far.

Contribution

This command doesn’t handle some cases (like different encodings) but I do my best to improve it. If you find this code useful and want to make a contribution I’m waiting for your pull requests. :)

Thanks.