Deltachat inbox bot

Summary: I wrote a Deltachat bot to capture ideas and tasks to my org-mode files on the go.

I'm organizing myself more and more using emacs's org-modeā€”It's an emacs major mode, it's plain text, it's customizable and extensible like no other thing, it's great, check it out. I try to use concepts from the GTD method, one of which being the capture part of the process: put the ideas or pieces of information into an "inbox" when they come up. But that sometimes happens when I'm not in front of a computer. There are a number of android apps that interact with org-mode files, but for some reason or another, it's never been ideal. Plus, I just want to jot in new headlines in a "inbox.org" file, maybe attach a picture or a vocal note, nothing more. I've wrote something in the past that would listen to incoming emails and add their content to a "inbox.org" file, so I could essentially email stuff directly to my org-mode inbox, but it didn't stick because the resulting program was a bit convoluted and not super reliable.

Enters Deltachat. It's a good decentralized messenger, that has bots which are pretty quick and straightforward to write and host. So I wrote the Deltachat inbox bot. Every message (and its attachments) sent to it are added as a new headline in my inbox org-mode file. The computer that hosts the bot needs to have access to the inbox file of course, which I do using Syncthing. You can check out the bot and its code here:

https://git.sr.ht/~bgtdsword/deltachat-inbox-bot

The ratio of I much code this is to how much I use and rely on it is pretty high. Adding a task on the go has now very low friction: you just write it to the bot's conversation (to which you can set a shortcut on your homescreen).

This is a very niche bot that is useful for the 10 people who live at the intersection between Deltachat and org-mode users. If you happen to be one of them, feel free to try the bot out and send any comment you might have.

The content for this site is CC-BY-SA. The code for this site is MIT.