Nearly two years back I wrote a utility called Captee that uses the native macOS Share Menu ( ) to share a link or text clipping in either Markdown or Org format. The idea was that any macOS app that supported the Share Menu could take advantage of this. Among the features that Captee supported was the ability to share content via Org Protocol, a custom URL scheme devised to import content into Emacs.

However, for Org Protocol to work, it required that there be a way to transport the org-protocol:// URL request to Emacs on macOS. Org Protocol’s original implementation presumed that emacsclient would do the lifting here, where the sharing app would be able to call emacsclient with the org-protocol// request as its argument. This was however a regrettable design decision made over a decade ago as recent versions of macOS now have a default sandbox policy that prevents an app from calling an executable like emacsclient outside of its sandbox.

The Mitsuharu Yamamoto fork of Emacs got around this restriction by supporting the Org Protocol custom URL scheme natively, where it would directly accept the URL request, bypassing emacsclient. Unfortunately for users of GNU FSF-published Emacs, Org Protocol was viable only if emacsclient was enabled, typically by relaxing macOS security permissions.

To address the above for GNU FSF-published Emacs, I set out to build a proxy utility that would accept the org-protocol:// URL request and transport it to Emacs in a way that conforms to macOS security policies. In effect, I made a macOS client app for Emacs server.

This app is named Scrim and is now in BETA test. I’m looking for testers, especially for those of you who already have Captee. If you’re interested and willing to provide feedback, please add yourself to the Beta test group on TestFlight, an Apple tool for distributing code-signed apps. At current I’m most interested in the following feedback:

• Sanity check - Does the app work as advertised?
• Were the instructions to setup Emacs server easy to follow? If not, then what was missing?
• Are you a user of Captee?

If you do sign yourself up for this, please provide answers to the above via the mail feedback in the Scrim app.

Thanks!

YES, I WANT TO BETA TEST SCRIM

emacs   org mode