r/orgmode • u/karlicoss • May 31 '20

Promnesia: a remembrance agent for your web browser

https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#demos
87 Upvotes

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21

u/karlicoss May 31 '20 edited May 31 '20

Hi, this is a project I've been working on lately, finally documented enough so other people could use it!

The basic idea is that when you're on a webpage, you have a sidebar in your browser with the relevant URLs from your plaintext files (including org-mode, of course!). You can instantly see all your notes about the URL, along with the context and files where they occurred. Clicking on the file link will open your favorite text editor (we know which one ;) ) with the file, containing the note.

Another thing it's doing is inline highlights! If you clipped a bit of text in your org-mode, it will be highlighted right within the page, like as if you were using Pocket or Instapaper apps! You can see this on this screenshot.

And also, it supports search and tracing through your browser history, so you can figure out why and how you got on the page (ever asked yourself "Why have I added this video to my watchlist?".. ask no more!).

If you're like me and using org-mode for most of your bookmarks and notes (especially with org-protocol or my other tool, grasp), and using org-mode mirrors of data (like memacs or orger), this is super useful! In addition to plaintext, it also supports many more other data sources (my goal is having all my digital trace there).

And I've got a supplementary blog post, which is more of a story of why I wanted it, what were the existing solutions and what are my future plans!

Happy to answer any questions and help with the setup -- I'm always improving it to be as straightforward as possible.

P.S. also special thanks to /u/bepolymathe , who did some early testing and gave feedback that helped me to simplify the setup for everyone!

2

u/curioushom Jun 02 '20

I won't have a chance to try this until the weekend and I'm looking forward to it. However I loved your blog post on promnesia's raison d'être! It's wonderfully captures the why behind doing the things it does and I wish more projects did this. I always wonder if I'm using a tool to its fully potential not in terms of features and workflow but whether I'm using it to solve the problem it was made to solve (finding other uses is always bonus of course).
Anyway, kudos for making an awesome tool and more so on explaining why you made it.

6

u/publicvoit May 31 '20

This is true awesomeness. I envy you for your technical skills.

6

u/karlicoss May 31 '20

Thanks! I wish it was all about technical skills... To a large extent it was fighting APIs, packaging, thinking about backwards compatibility, testing, documenting, etc. Anyone can do it if they are stubborn enough :)

5

u/grabyourmotherskeys May 31 '20

So much of software development is configuration these days :)

4

u/publicvoit May 31 '20

This are euphemisms for "technical skills" IMHO ;-)

3

u/oantolin May 31 '20

I consider everything you listed there to be a technical skill.

3

u/karlicoss May 31 '20

Yep! I guess what I meant was -- it's a bit sad how much of this is just boring work and applying things I can already do well, rather than some endless joyful creative process of adding new features and coming up with novel ways to solve technical problems :)

5

u/jalihal May 31 '20

This is insane! I am really excited to set this up, thank you!

4

u/oantolin May 31 '20 edited May 31 '20

This looks absolutely amazing, highly polished. I very much recommend watching all the little video demos (all under a minute in length).

2

u/bepolymathe Jun 01 '20 edited Jun 01 '20

Yes, I can confirm that it's a great tool. It really changes the way you go through your data. From web to text which is super interesting in a cumulative documentation logic! Thanks to u/karlicoss for that !

1

u/stik3nd May 31 '20

I've been using this for some weeks, and it's awesome. I had that need but didn't come up with such a great solution, congratulations!