1 Preface

This document describes remember-el, which was written by John Wiegley, was once maintained by Sacha Chua, and is now maintained by the Emacs developers.

This document is a work in progress, and your contribution will be greatly appreciated.

2 Introduction

Todo lists, schedules, phone databases... everything we use databases for is really just a way to extend the power of our memory, to be able to remember what our conscious mind may not currently have access to.

There are many different databases out there—and good ones—which this mode is not trying to replace. Rather, it's how that data gets there that's the question. Most of the time, we just want to say "Remember so-and-so's phone number, or that I have to buy dinner for the cats tonight." That's the FACT. How it's stored is really the computer's problem. But at this point in time, it's most definitely also the user's problem, and sometimes so laboriously so that people just let data slip, rather than expend the effort to record it.

“Remember” is a mode for remembering data. It uses whatever back-end is appropriate to record and correlate the data, but its main intention is to allow you to express as little structure as possible up front. If you later want to express more powerful relationships between your data, or state assumptions that were at first too implicit to be recognized, you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible.

Have you ever noticed that having a laptop to write on doesn't actually increase the amount of quality material that you turn out, in the long run? Perhaps it's because the time we save electronically in one way, we're losing electronically in another; the tool should never dominate one's focus. As the mystic Faridu'd-Din `Attar wrote: “Be occupied as little as possible with things of the outer world but much with things of the inner world; then right action will overcome inaction.”

If Emacs could become a more intelligent data store, where brainstorming would focus on the ideas involved—rather than the structuring and format of those ideas, or having to stop your current flow of work in order to record them—it would map much more closely to how the mind (well, at least mine) works, and hence would eliminate that very manual-ness which computers from the very beginning have been championed as being able to reduce.

3 Installation

Installing Remember Mode is as simple as adding the following lines to your Emacs configuration file (usually ~/.emacs.d/init.el or ~/.emacs).

     (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/remember")
     (require 'remember)

4 Implementation

Hyperbole, as a data presentation tool, always struck me as being very powerful, but it seemed to require a lot of “front-end” work before that data was really available. The problem with BBDB, or keeping up a Bibl-mode file, is that you have to use different functions to record the data, and it always takes time to stop what you're doing, format the data in the manner expected by that particular data interface, and then resume your work.

With “remember”, you just hit M-x remember (you'd probably want to bind this to an easily accessible keystroke, like C-x M-r), slam in your text however you like, and then hit C-c C-c. It will file the data away for later retrieval, and possibly indexing.

Indexing is to data what “studying” is in the real world. What you do when you study (or lucubrate, for some of us) is to realize certain relationships implicit in the data, so that you can make use of those relationships. Expressing that a certain quote you remembered was a literary quote, and that you want the ability to pull up all quotes of a literary nature, is what studying does. This is a more labor intensive task than the original remembering of the data, and it's typical in real life to set aside a special period of time for doing this work.

“Remember” works in the same way. When you enter data, either by typing it into a buffer, or using the contents of the selected region, it will store that data—unindexed, uninterpreted—in a data pool. It will also try to remember as much context information as possible (any text properties that were set, where you copied it from, when, how, etc.). Later, you can walk through your accumulated set of data (both organized, and unorganized) and easily begin moving things around, and making annotations that will express the full meaning of that data, as far as you know it.

Obviously this latter stage is more user-interface intensive, and it would be nice if “remember” could do it as elegantly as possible, rather than requiring a billion keystrokes to reorganize your hierarchy. Well, as the future arrives, hopefully experience and user feedback will help to make this as intuitive a tool as possible.

5 Quick Start

• Load remember.el.
• Type M-x remember. The ‘*Remember*’ buffer should be displayed.
• Type in what you want to remember. The first line will be treated as the headline, and the rest of the buffer will contain the body of the note.
• Type C-c C-c (remember-finalize) to save the note and close the ‘*Remember*’ buffer.

By default, remember-finalize saves the note in ~/.notes. You can edit it now to see the remembered and timestamped note. You can edit this file however you want. New entries will always be added to the end.

To remember a region of text, use the universal prefix. C-u M-x remember displays a ‘*Remember*’ buffer with the region as the initial contents.

As a simple beginning, you can start by using the Text File backend, keeping your ~/.notes file in outline-mode format, with a final entry called ‘* Raw data’. Remembered data will be added to the end of the file. Every so often, you can move the data that gets appended there into other files, or reorganize your document.

You can also store remembered data in other backends. (see Backends)

Here is one way to map the remember functions in your .emacs to very accessible keystrokes facilities using the mode:

     (autoload 'remember ``remember'' nil t)
     (autoload 'remember-region ``remember'' nil t)
     
     (define-key global-map (kbd "<f9> r") 'remember)
     (define-key global-map (kbd "<f9> R") 'remember-region)

By default, remember uses the first annotation returned by remember-annotation-functions. To include all of the annotations, set remember-run-all-annotation-functions-flag to non-nil.

You can write custom functions that use a different set of remember-annotation-functions. For example:

     (defun my/remember-with-filename ()
      "Always use the filename."
      (interactive)
      (let ((remember-annotation-functions '(buffer-file-name)))
       (call-interactively 'remember)))

6 Function Reference

remember.el defines the following interactive functions:

7 Keystroke Reference

remember.el defines the following keybindings by default:

C-c C-c (`remember-finalize')

Remember the contents of the current buffer.

C-c C-k (`remember-destroy')

Destroy the current *Remember* buffer.

C-x C-s (`remember-finalize')

Remember the contents of the current buffer.

8 Backends

You can save remembered notes to a variety of backends.

• Text File: Saving to a text file.
• Diary: Saving to a Diary file.
• Mailbox: Saving to a mailbox.
• Org: Saving to an Org Mode file.

8.1 Saving to a Text File

Insinuation

     (setq remember-handler-functions '(remember-append-to-file))

Options

8.2 Saving to a Diary file

Insinuation

     (add-to-list 'remember-handler-functions 'remember-diary-extract-entries)

Options

8.3 Saving to a Mailbox

Insinuation

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

Options

8.4 Saving to an Org Mode file

For instructions on how to integrate Remember with Org Mode, consult Capture.

Appendix A GNU Free Documentation License

     Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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Index

• diary, integration: Diary
• mailbox, saving to: Mailbox
• org mode, integration: Org
• remember: Function Reference
• remember-clipboard: Function Reference
• remember-finalize: Function Reference
• remember-mode: Function Reference
• remember-region: Function Reference
• text file, saving to: Text File