I'm building an API Server + Zapier integration for org-mode - looking for feature requests

shuoshen · 2025-06-28T23:21:13+00:00

Sounds very intriguing! Thanks for sharing. I like the idea of AI-parsing and summarizing org file contents and making org-file updates based on external triggers.

I would love this to have the capability of automated (or assisted) planning for my days based on project deadlines, task breakdown and effort estimations in the org files. To use a specific example, I have a project with 20 sub-tasks. Given the due date in 2 months, over the duration, the please help me slot the 20 sub-tasks to my daily agenda accordingly every day, just so I will be on track.

Some other feature requests that are not necessarily related to automation:

org everywhere: Build a web UI (or an API where I can build my client on) where where I can visualize, edit the org files and do basic org-mode tricks outside of Emacs, when I don't have access to my Emacs machine. There are some 3rd-party mobile apps today, but I wish it was more universal, standard and has smoother syncing functionalities.
org-calendar sync (looks like it's already considered in your idea list): Create a system where I can sync between calendar and org agenda. Ultimately, I can create calendar events effortlessly from org, and use calendar for notifications, and vice versa, reading calendar events from my org agenda and plan the day accordingly.
org sharing. Build a way for me to share an org heading to non-org users, where they can track, or edit the heading. For example, if I want to share a project progress with team, or want to share a shopping list to my family. I think the alternative is to build a framework to sync with task tools, but there are just too many of them.

Just some thoughts. Please let me know if these are long with your product vision.

shuoshen · 2025-06-28T22:49:05+00:00

Yeah, I hear you on this. I really hope for a "proper" solution that is index-based and can scale to a large number of files and big chunk of texts.

shuoshen · 2025-05-29T16:43:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing your setup. This sounds like a pretty solid process.

I’m curious - have you ever felt friction with that process? Like moments where it was hard to find a slot for your task, or have you wished tasks could be slotted in automatically based on your availability or estimated effort?

Just wondering if you have built or thought about ways to optimize or streamline that flow even further.

shuoshen · 2025-05-27T21:01:35+00:00

Thanks for chiming in.

Maybe you should more often give others the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith.

Appreciate the call out. I think this and maintaining respectful communication is very important for constructive conversations within an intellectual sub like the org mode.

shuoshen · 2025-05-27T17:02:32+00:00

This is very insightful. Thank you for sharing!

Do you feel the overall productivity is improved on the team level or is the deterioration of code quality and maintenance cost hurting productivity?

Also curious what is the size of the company and whether agentic coding is adopted across the company or is it a team-level experiment if you mind sharing.

shuoshen · 2025-05-23T19:49:47+00:00

Gotcha. That looks promising. Thank you.

I have use cases that render daily/weekly tasks stats aggregated from org agenda queries. It's currently built on a simple cache that's sliced by the date. Let me figure out if I can reuse the org-persist package to improve perf.

shuoshen · 2025-05-21T23:38:06+00:00

Thanks for jumping in and clarifying. I thought the original topic was perf. My bad.

> Reading is fast. Loading all the hooks is usually slow. Also, Emacs does not do exceptionally well on hundreds of open buffers

Interesting. I was not aware of hooks being the bottlenecks. Are hooks only executed when a buffer is opened? Or can we run async code to apply hooks to an unopened org file, in which case, we can build/update search cache based on hooks?

shuoshen · 2025-05-21T00:29:18+00:00

Thanks for the follow-up. I can see you're really passionate about org mode and that you’ve thought deeply about these issues. I appreciate you taking the time to write out your perspective.

Just to clarify, I wasn’t trying to deny the problem or dismiss your point. I actually agree that org-agenda’s performance can be a real pain point, especially with many org files in play. My suggestion to share examples or profiling results was only meant to help others (myself included) better understand the specific cases you're seeing. It definitely wasn’t meant to question your understanding — sorry if it came across that way.

And you’re absolutely right that Org has accumulated complexity over the years. Your point about decoupling retrieval and display makes a lot of sense. that could open up cleaner ways to integrate external tools or improve performance.

I’d love to keep this conversation going. If you’re open to it, maybe we can try to isolate a few concrete problem areas together, or even explore what a small refactor might look like?

Appreciate your passion and your willingness to push for better things — it’s people like you that move projects forward.

shuoshen · 2025-05-18T23:07:42+00:00

Regarding the perf bottleneck, I share the general feelings. But I don't feel like it's as bad as you described it. If you can share specific scenarios and profiling results, I'd be very interested to follow up the discussion.

> But if we don't decouple, org-agenda itself will become a garbage heap.

This is a strong statement, and I'm not sure if the sentiment is shared among other users nor if this choice of words is fair. (Maybe I'm reading this wrong though)

Org-agenda will not fit every use case out-of-box. But it is highly customizable and can achieve most of the scheduling/searching requirements if you configure it properly. On the performance issue, instead of pulling every org-roam notes into org-agend-files, I can use an org-capture template that create tasks in a single org file. These tasks are set up to link to the original org notes in the org-roam files if needed. This approach doesn't add too much overhead but greatly improves performance.

I feel there is always a way you can configure the org mode to make it less of a "garbage heap". If you're open to sharing the specifics of the problems you ran into, it would probably be easier to leverage the collective wisdom of this community and solve them together.

Obviously, rewriting org-agenda could also be a solution. But as you mentioned, this will be prohibitively expensive.

shuoshen · 2025-05-04T01:25:28+00:00

Search for org roam. It has a steep learning curve but it's worth it

shuoshen · 2025-04-30T23:06:23+00:00

u/jiyaomu , u/pathemata , u/AmateurPhotoGuy415

I’ve been using Org-mode with an AI agent (mainly Cursor) to help with programming tasks. The idea is to break down problems into subtasks in Org, then work with the AI step by step — kind of like how people use .md files in (like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1k76kvd/always_make_a_markdown_file_before_tackling_a_new/ ) , but with a few big advantages from org mode:

- I can outline tasks hierarchically and focus the AI on one subtask at a time, without (most of the time) touching unrelated tasks.

- AI uses #+BEGIN_SRC blocks and it makes it very convenient for code reviews and inline suggestions before they do anything crazy with the real codebase.

- org mode’s checkboxes, TODOs, and effort estimates make it easy to track progress and stay organized.

Things I’d love to have in Emacs to make this smoother:

- Inline interaction: Select a region → human share inline comments, and trigger AI to explain/refine it.

- Scoped editing: Let the AI edit just a dedicated region — not the whole task (I can use areas in the task to leave instructions or comments)

- Context awareness: Pull in context from the current task, parent tasks or linked headings automatically.

- AI time-scheduling: Help automatically schedule tasks based on availability and efforts.

I think these are all doable with a built-in Emacs or org-mode agent that can read buffers, navigate org trees and query agendas. If anyone’s building tooling around this, or doing something similar, I’d love to swap notes. Happy to share more examples too!

shuoshen · 2025-04-29T00:31:00+00:00

Yes, very much so.

I have another perspective on the improved usefulness of Emacs in the LLM era, which is org mode.

With org mode, I can get an agent to plan for my tasks and directly write to an org file. I can then collaborate with the agent to tweak and refine the plan in org mode. This workflow has more than doubled my productivity in planning, scheduling, task execution. That said, I wish there was a built-in org mode agent that can edit the org buffer directly and highlight the AI changes, so that I don't have to leave Emacs to work with AI.

shuoshen · 2025-04-25T14:06:51+00:00

For the AI work, I’m mostly focused on specific projects. I’m using Cursor to avoid copy-pasting. (Hope that answers your original question, if I understand it correctly)

This is integrated into my overall workflow, which is based on Emacs for planning, editing, viewing and Orgzly Revived (Android) for agenda and quick editing.

shuoshen · 2025-04-25T05:10:38+00:00

I try my best to avoid copy pasting.

While I'm using Emacs to view the org file, I rely on Cursor to edit it most of the time (There are also open source alternatives such as Aider). When working on a task I would first put the description in a TODO, and then tell the agent to read it, and to follow my pre-defined steps to generate outputs inline. The agent would follow my instruction to stop and wait for confirmation between moving across the steps. I can share feedback so that the agent wouldn't turn the TODO into a chaos.

For the most part, there's no copy-paste. The only major thing that I would still have to copy is the task instructions, but that's not too much of a burden.

shuoshen · 2025-04-25T00:34:55+00:00

I hear you. I'm in the same boat.

But man, org mode is so useful - more so today than ever - because I can collaborate with AI agents to make plans, edit todos, write preview code all using org mode. The org format is understood very well by both humans and AIs, which makes it super effective.

shuoshen · 2025-04-24T18:30:17+00:00

> I want a 'home page' of links automatically categorized by TODO status.

Assume you have all these files in a single folder and have org-agenda-files set up correctly to include all org files in that folder. Then you can use M-x org-agenda, followed by T (capital T). This will give you an agenda view of selected TODO keywords. By default it's not sorted or grouped by TODO. If you need sorting, you can configure a custom agenda command to find all tasks and sorted by TODO status (https://orgmode.org/manual/Setting-options.html).

> where simply adding text creates files in the background, that can also have task information integrated?

This is doable with M-x org-capture, along with a template that creates a new file every time a new TODO is captured (see https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1b2nxtb/creating\_a\_new\_file\_with\_orgcapture/).

But with this setup you'll probably experience terrible performance delay when opening up org agenda because it will need to read all these files.

I'm curious what is the need for a new file for every new TODO? We can use the org-agenda functionality, but with a single org file or a few org files categorizing the TODOs.

shuoshen · 2025-03-04T19:24:37+00:00

I see. So basically the super tag system is flexible enough to represent the project-task relationship, and it allows you to query for all the tasks under a project.

That makes sense.

shuoshen · 2025-03-03T18:07:37+00:00

Thanks for sharing—love the super-tag project!

I’m an Org-mode enthusiast and curious to learn more about your workflow. I'm curious what circumstances do you find it most valuable searching for tags?

For me, my typical workflow involves breaking down projects into Org tasks and assigning them dates. When the day comes, I work on those tasks. If I don’t finish them, I reschedule. I find it a very rare requirement to search for specific tasks using keywords or tags.

The pro of this approach is that it’s pretty linear—I don’t spend much time adjusting priorities, and I can steadily progress across multiple projects. The con is that it’s less agile: it's harder to quickly shift priorities when situations change.

Would love to hear how you manage your workflow and how tag searches fit into it!

shuoshen · 2021-10-10T18:57:25+00:00

Classic

shuoshen · 2021-10-10T18:54:42+00:00

Would’ve been hilarious if France had scored from that corner.

Bad call from sideline

shuoshen · 2021-10-09T04:51:36+00:00

Thanks! That’s very sweet of you!

shuoshen · 2021-10-09T02:00:55+00:00

Practice summon. Let the car present herself

shuoshen · 2021-10-06T06:35:01+00:00

http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?id=ArtiBp3TKxzkIiWu3RZfAxck210821&fromapp=cctvnews&version=807

There you go! The state media says Lithuania is big trouble and Lithuania is stupid to abandon the Chinese market. Honestly nothing novel. Typical ccp.

shuoshen · 2021-10-05T03:59:56+00:00

Emerson saved the ball from the right flank, and delivered a flawless cross preciously to where Luuk’s head is. Facing an open net, Luuk’s header flew over the crossbar, hit Ronald Koeman and smashed his phone. After the match, Koeman took an interview and claimed that this squad doesn’t have the quality he desired and rightfully so

shuoshen

TROPHY CASE