Capturing Regions with Org Capture

28. February 2018

I’m an avid user of org-capture for recording TODOs, code snippets, and reference material without interrupting my train of thought. A quick C-c c t lets me rattle off a note-to-self while capturing a link back to the buffer I’m in for later reference.

I recently found myself frequently repeating the pattern of calling kill-ring-save on a region to yank it into my org-capture buffer. By taking advantage of org-capture-templates and a little elisp, this pattern can be reduced to simply highlighting the target region before invoking capture.

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8 (defun my/org-capture-region-or-nil (s)
  (if (and s (not (equal s "")))
      (format "#+BEGIN_QUOTE\n%s#+END_QUOTE" s)))

;; Capture Template
("t" "todo" entry
 (file+headline ,(my/org-dir-file "todo.org") "Unfiled")
 "* TODO %?\n%U\n%a\n%(my/org-capture-region-or-nil \"%i\")\n")

Now if you select this template from the org-capture template window with a region highlighted, you’ll end up in a buffer with the following text and your point located at |.

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6 ** TODO |
 [2018-02-28 Wed 13:39]
 [[org-store-link-result]]
 #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
  <Captured Text Here>
 #+END_EXAMPLE

If there’s no region highlighted, the example block will not be present.

I hope you find this useful!