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It all started with a routine task. I use GitHub issues for all of my public-facing projects but my preference is keeping track of things in Org Agenda. To reconcile the two, I would manually copy over the GitHub issue to an Org file, typically the title and description, like an animal .

Despite this separation, the duplicated issue allowed me to treat it as a scratchpad for anything I could express in Org. In this way, I used the duplicated issue in Org as both a dedicated area to take notes and a “staging” area to compose follow-up comments that I’d want to share in the public facing issue.

I manually copied for far longer than I care to admit. Repeat a task enough times in Emacs and the inevitable thought arises: “I should automate this.”

This post recounts how I automated this task and in doing so, highlight the malleable computing capabilities of Emacs. It should also be considered a follow-up to my earlier post “ In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service ”.

An essential question to ask in any automation exercise is “What do I want done?”

Another essential question to ask is “What do I not want to do?”