Capture from terminal

[jgollenz]

This may be considered golfing. I often find myself outside of vim when I want to capture something in orgmode. Being naturally lazy efficient I looked at my workflow

1. open vim (v)
2. shortcut to open capture buffer (<leader>oc)
3. capture
4. close capture (:wq)
5. close vim (:q)

and it's less than desirable. Yes I can collapse steps 4 and 5 to :wqa and I will relearn my fingers to do so (perhaps you know an even better way than :wqa?). But still, I already know that I want to only make a capture and nothing else before step 1. So I researched if I could do something like v -"<leader>oc" to jump directly into the capture buffer. Indeed, there is -c|--cmd that allows me to do this v +"norm 1 oc" (see this question for why the 1 is necessary when your <leader> is mapped to space). But alas! It does not work for this particular remapping. The norm 1 ... syntax works for other mappings I have and also for e.g. norm 1 oih. I have made no research yet why it does not work for for norm 1 oc, but it also doesn't work for norm 1 oa (opening the agenda), so I suspect it's something about opening a buffer.

The reason I write here is that perhaps I'm doing this all wrong and there is a really easy way to start the capture buffer straight from the terminal.

[kristijanhusak]

You can probably write your own wrapper around these calls to make your life easier. Something like this:

-- Orgmode setup call. This is needed in the function
local org = require('orgmode').setup(require('partials.orgmode_config'))

function _G.capture_from_terminal()
  -- Ensure org is initialized
  org:init()

  vim.schedule(function()
    -- Open desired template
    org.capture:open_template_by_shortcut('t')
    -- Map Q to write + exit Neovim. Make sure to leave vim.schedule calls
    -- to make sure everything is written
    vim.keymap.set('n', 'Q', function()
      vim.cmd[[wq]]
      vim.schedule(function()
        vim.cmd[[qall!]]
      end)
    end)
  end)
end

And then run your nvim with nvim -c "lua capture_from_terminal()", write your notes, and press Q in normal mode.

Note that this touches some of the internal things, so I'm not guaranteeing this will not break in future.
But I believe it should work for the most part.

[jgollenz]

Thanks a lot! Been tinkering around with it but it keeps crashing on vim.keymap, telling me that it is null. And when I comment out the mapping part, there does not seem to be a template with shortcut t (or any other shortcut). Almost like something might not be loaded/initialized? Any idea what could cause that? My nvim version is 0.6.0. What works fine is just doing org.capture:prompt() (shows all my templates+shortcuts correctly) instead, which what I was envisioning originally. But your approach with specifying the template is even better since I can wrap it in a bash function that I would call like so c <template_shortcut>

The only thing I have different from your snippet is that my config is in the same file, .setup({...})

[jgollenz]

Hm, turns out that c<CR>t is faster than c<SPACE>t<CR>. I will still try to find out what the issue is about, but I probably just stick to invoking org.capture:prompt() :)

[kristijanhusak]

vim.keymap is available only on 0.7.0-dev. If you are using stable version, you need to replace it with nvim_buf_set_keymap.
Regarding the shortcut, do you have option t when you open up the prompt? I used that since it's built in for capturing to refile file, but maybe you override it.

How you do setup doesn't matter, I just put mine as an example.

[jgollenz]

I see, that explains that. Will try with 0.7.0 when I get the time.

do you have option t when you open up the prompt

I left that at the default, so t should be there. But I tried also with other shortcuts for my custom templates. Didn't work either.

Fixed it with #231

[kristijanhusak]

Merged it, should be working now.

[lanker]

I use nvim +"lua require('orgmode').action('capture.prompt')" to open nvim in capture mode.

[jgollenz]

That's very clean, I like it :) made an alias for nvim +"lua require('orgmode').action('agenda.agenda')" as well

Thank you!