I have been an org-mode user for a decent amount of time (years? decades? What even is time these days?) Not quite the grandpa “back in my day” length of time that makes people roll their eyes and immediately go back to browsing Reddit on their phones, but I have done a decent amount of customization and adaptations in my workflow over time.

One issue I frequently ran into when integrating org-protocol into my workflow is that several configuration examples lying around the web simply did not work for me. Org-protocol seems to be finicky based on tool versions and system configurations.

This post is an attempt to outline how I use it on my system and to hopefully help anyone with similar problems to solve. It focuses on integrating org-protocol into a workflow along with Firefox and Mutt. Org-protocol obviously integrates with other tools as well, but I do not have experience with anything else at the moment … so here we are. This post is written with the assumption that the system has Emacs installed and that the reader has at least minimal familiarity with org-mode. It is also written from the perspective of a GNU/Linux system, so there may be some adjustments required for other types of environments.

I’ve been told that utilizing this functionality is terrible, bad practice, a mistake, contributes to climate change, etc. However, it fits into my workflow pretty well, and it might fit into yours as well. After all, it is implemented in at least two version control systems…so some people must find it useful, right?

I use both Mercurial and Git depending on the project, so I’ll briefly describe the usage for both, with references to more complete documentation at the end. While the implementation is different, in both cases there are essentially multiple working directories for a single repository.

There are several ways to assign a hotkey to a particular piece of functionality in Blender. The most well-known is probably right-clicking on a menu item and selecting Add Shortcut, which works great most of the time. Once applied, shortcuts can be changed or removed in a similar manner via Change Shortcut and Remove Shortcut. However, it is possible to get into a situation where a key combination is applied that cannot be removed in this manner, and cannot be re-applied to another piece of functionality. The method below can be used to remove these duplicate assignments.

I was unable to find much information about this issue so it’s either somewhat obscure or I’m terrible at searching for things. Probably both.

Background

I originally ran into this problem when trying to run Firefox in Firejail using the standard Firejail profile for Firefox. Firefox ran fine, except there was no audio. I found that this was a known issue documented here, but unfortunately none of the suggested fixes had any effect. The page states that newer versions of PulseAudio do not exhibit that issue, so that is not really surprising.

There are many solutions for accessing GUI applications as another user (in X Windows). Several are described in this excellent post on the Arch Linux Wiki.

However, I needed a different solution as I frequently “su” to different accounts in the terminal to perform different tasks – I normally don’t just start one application and then exit back to the original user.

While by no means an “essential” setting for many users, the internalBorder setting in rxvt-unicode can go a long way towards making the terminal more readable or simply looking more the way you want. It adds some padding between the edge of the terminal window and the start of the text, both at the top/bottom and the left/right of the window. This is especially useful if you use a tiling window manager and do not otherwise have spacing between windows.

The (arguably) venerable xterm terminal emulator has a similar property called BorderWidth.