jthorpe6 / org-apple-notes

Teaching Org Mode to talk to Apple Notes

org-apple-notes

This Emacs package will eventually provide two-way synchronization between an Org file and a document stored in Apple Notes. The goal is to provide the ability to edit notes on an Apple mobile device using the Notes app, and edit the same documents in Emacs where Emacs is available.

Right now, only push functionality from Org to Notes is implemented.

Assumptions

• Emacs is running on a macOS machine
• for mobile sync, the macOS user account is connected to the same iCloud account as the target mobile devices

Instructions

In an Org file, call org-apple-notes-push.

If the following are defined in the Org file, they specify which Apple Notes document to push to:

#+APPLE-NOTES-ACCOUNT: iCloud
#+APPLE-NOTES-FOLDER: Writing
#+APPLE-NOTES-TITLE: Short Story Ideas

Otherwise, the function prompts using org-apple-notes-completing-read-fn, which can be customized. Helm users should set it to helm-comp-read and Ivy users should set it to ivy-completing-read. Ido users may prefer ido-completing-read.

Limitations

org-apple-notes-pull which would read an Apple Notes document, is not currently implemented (see the Next section).

Text not round-trip cleanly due to the way the Apple Notes import process works.

• Notes import mucks with the HTML, for example: <h2> tags get converted to <span style="font-size: 18px">...</span> tags, though native subheadings export as <h2>.
• Notes heading formatting is not preserved and cannot be written to.
• Notes checklists do not import or export.

Next

Should find a way to use Pandoc to read Notes into Org files. It won’t be pretty, but it should at least allow some imports, if only for source-controlled clean files (to reduce data loss).

Bugs

• problems with quotes in titles (AppleScript escape errors)