Announcing Scrim - An Org Protocol Proxy for Emacs on macOS
28 Apr 2025 Charles Choi
Org mode celebrates its ability to export to a multitude of formats. However, lesser known is its ability to import content. One of the ways to import into Org is through a custom URL scheme. This scheme is referred to as Org Protocol (scheme name: org‑protocol://). The motivating idea for using a URL scheme was this: any app outside of Emacs could construct and make an org‑protocol:// URL request without needing any security permissions.
Regrettably, the original implementation of Org Protocol presumed that emacsclient would do the work of making the actual URL request to Emacs. This thinking did not consider the notion that app sandboxing would become widespread practice, preventing other programs from calling emacsclient. So it is with recent releases of macOS: its default policy is to only allow an app to access programs within its prescribed sandbox.
That said, I ❤️ Org Protocol, so much so that I provided support for it in a utility called Captee that lets you share links and text clippings from the macOS Share Menu. I wanted Org Protocol to work on macOS, but for years it was broken due to its dependence on emacsclient. The only workaround was to use the Mitsuharu Yamamoto fork of Emacs which implemented native support for org-protocol:// URL requests. For a number of years, the Yamamoto fork was my daily driver. Unfortunately though, it seems to have succumbed to bit-rot as it has not kept track with recent releases of GNU Emacs (in particular 30.1). I made the switch over to GNU Emacs 30.1, but in doing so I had to give up Org Protocol support.
I missed Org Protocol, so I decided to do something about it. I wrote an app.
Scrim is a macOS utility to act as a proxy to take an Org Protocol request from any app and relay that to Emacs. In effect, Scrim is a native macOS client for Emacs server.
Learn more about Scrim at its website.
Scrim is now available for purchase on the Mac App Store.
As Scrim and Captee compliment each other so well, you can get them both at a discounted price.
