GoKawiil22 Jul 2026 Charles Choi
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”.
Requirements
An essential question to ask in any automation exercise is “What do I want done?”
I wanted to be able to:
Easily copy a GitHub issue (title, description, some metadata) as an Org task that can be tracked in an Agenda view.
Work primarily from Emacs to minimize the context switching between it and a web browser.
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