org-mode-sms-inbox

Dan Guilak // May 26th, 2016

TL;DR: org-mode-sms-inbox is a way to add stuff to your org-mode files that leverages Dropbox, Twilio, and IFTTT. Just text your item, have it show up in your inbox later!

Want to skip straight to the good stuff without reading my half-baked drivel? Check out the GitHub repository.

I've really been enjoying learning to use org-mode ever since I decided to switch from Vim to Spacemacs. I don't need to sing its praises here, many others have already done so. It isn't, however, without its flaws.

Sure, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, but I'm almost never at a computer when inspiration strikes. I have a giant Evernote "Ideas" notebook that is full of spur-of-the-moment inspiration. It's all useless stuff, but it's fun to be able to have a glimpse into my consciousness after the fact.

It's easy to harvest the dumb ideas I have — I can just open the Evernote app and jot off a quick one. But the mobile landscape for org-mode is ... lackluster. There's Orgzly for Android which looks pretty great, but the only thing for iOS seems to be MobileOrg which doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.

So in typical developer fashion, I plotted out how I was going to alleviate this pain point for myself — I wanted to be able to jot down quick little notes to myself and have them ready in org-mode I can use them as jumping-off points later. I'll just write a quick app in Ionic- no, wait, React Native! I'll make a cool logo for it and it'll get thousands of reviews on the App Store! The feature creep was so thick and palpable you could cut it with a knife.

Halfway into speccing out my Ionically React Native Synergistic Cloud-Based Mobile Org-Mode note-taking platform I realized I was way overdoing it.

So here's org-mode-sms-inbox, which allows you to text a phone number and have it drop an item into your (Dropbox-synced) org folder. That's it.

This blog post has more lines than the actual code does. It requires a bit of setup, but you can deploy it straight to a free-tier Heroku instance from its GitHub page. Give it a shot! Send me a PR! Fork it! Whatever!