I went down a rabbit hole with the built-in Remember mode in Emacs today.

# Persistant Scratch with remember-note

The Emacs *scratch* buffer is handy. It’s always available and easy to get to. However, by default it doesn’t persist between runs of Emacs. So, when I quit Emacs, anything in the scratch buffer is lost. Sometimes I get burned by this, so I thought I’d fix it using the persistent-scratch package.

While looking for details about the package, I spotted a couple comments about using the built-in remember-notes function instead.

Return the notes buffer, creating it if needed, and maybe switch to it. This buffer is for notes that you want to preserve across Emacs sessions. The notes are saved in ‘remember-data-file’.

OK, I tried it and it works great.

I now have a persistent Org mode file as my scratchpad, and I can easily capture new notes as org headings to it using remember.

# New frame defaults

Now that I had a nice, persistent scratchpad, I wanted it to be the default buffer for new frames and at startup. Easy enough:

;; Persistent notes (like persistent-scratch, but built-in)
(setq initial-buffer-choice 'remember-notes
	  remember-data-file "~/Documents/Notes/remember-notes"
	  remember-notes-initial-major-mode 'org-mode
	  remember-notes-auto-save-visited-file-name t
	  remember-in-new-frame t))

(defun my/switch-to-scratch-buffer (f)
  (with-selected-frame f
    (remember-notes t)))
	
(add-hook 'after-make-frame-functions #'my/switch-to-scratch-buffer)

I’m not sure all of that is necessary now that I’ve learned about remember-in-new-frame but it works as-is, so I’ll leave it.

# Remember mode via Raycast for system-wide capture

I’d created a keymap (C-c o n) for bringing up the remember-notes buffer while in Emacs, but thought it would be nice having a system-wide option. I’ve never understood how to configure =org-protocol= so I cheated and created a Raycast script:

#!/bin/bash

# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Remember
# @raycast.mode silent

# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon images/emacs.png

# Documentation:
# @raycast.description Open Emacs remember in new frame
# @raycast.author Jack Baty
# @raycast.authorURL https://baty.net

emacsclient -e "(remember-other-frame)"

Now I can trigger Raycast, type part of “Remember” (usually just “R” is enough) and it brings up a new Emacs frame containing the remember buffer. I type or paste whatever, and hit C-c C-c which adds the note to the remember file and kills the frame. Handy!

# Creating emails via Remember mode

While reading the Remember manual, I spotted the option to save Remember notes as emails. WUT?!

(add-to-list 'remember-handler-functions 'remember-store-in-mailbox)

By default, this uses an mbox file, ~/Mail/remember, which I can use Mutt to view.

neomutt -f ~/Mail/remember

Crazy, right? Yeah, I’m not going to view my captured notes in Mutt, but it’s cool that I could. But it got me thinking about my urge to put everything into Notmuch. Notmuch indexes Maildir-formatted emails, not mboxes. What if I converted the mbox to Maildir and used Emacs to read the notes where I’m already reading my emails? Plus super fast search and tagging, etc.?!

I’ve not gotten to that yet, but it’s something to think about.

# Now what?

This whole thing started because I wanted to make my scratch buffer persistent. Instead, I’ve ended up with a whole new capture setup for quick notes.

Why not use Org-capture or Howm-remember or a million possible other things for this? Fair question. The answer is that I didn’t know anything about Remember mode when I woke up this morning, and now I do. It remains to be seen whether I should have used Org-capture for this, but it was fun learning how to do it this way.

It’s possible we’ve, er, forgotten about Remember mode too soon.