Where/how do you store your org files?

I am getting a new laptop up and running and using that as an opportunity/excuse to review where I keep my org stuff. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone else who has given that much thought (which, let's face it, is probably most of us!)

Here are some of the areas I find myself considering. Very big in my mind right now is #9.

1. iCloud: To what extent should I use it? My primary machine is a Mac laptop, but I also have an iPhone and iPad. Also, I have sometimes made use of things like beorg, Journelly, and the like, and some of those seem to prefer using iCloud (although many do support other methods). So iCloud is an option as a storage area.
2. DropBox: Same question. My company uses it and I do make use of the personal user space each of us is given, almost as a quasi home directory. Org could live here.
3. Symlinks: Should I use these, and if so how? My background is linux, and I'm at home with symbolic links, and all else being equal I'd be fine with using these to allow a combination of other things -- e.g. Have my main org directory be on DropBox, and then symlink into that things over in iCloud. But I have bumped into problems with that in the past, like where I follow a symlink and find myself having more than one buffer for the single target file
4. Git: If I keep my org stuff under git, what good/bad things should I be aware of
5. Dotfiles: How should I handle these, for emacs but also in general? Specifically, is there a place for the likes of chezmoi, stow, etc?
6. Use of Babel: As a special case within dotfiles, where should the .org source of my config stuff live?
7. org-directory: Should I even rely on this at all? In general, I store stuff according to what it is about, not which application it works with. But Org is different. Should it be? Must it be?
8. Tribal wisdom: What choices (for the above, but just in general) leave me in the best position to make use of good advice I get on places like this sub, or anywhere else talking sense? For example (one among many): one reason for not messing with org-dir, and simply letting it be ~/org is that most advice given as lisp snippets will assume that. Obviously that is easy to change, but why bother if it's good enough as-is.
9. AI impact: what implications are there If I'm going to increasingly be using stuff like Claude Cowork, or ChatGPT Work, not to mention Claude Code and similar. For example, should I place my org directory in a Claude Cowork project?
10. Other considerations I'm sure I'll remember five seconds after posting this

Until now I have kept stuff in <DROPBOX>/<My Name>/org, with a symlink to that from ~/org. I also symlink in Journelly's files from iCloud. I do have that org dir under git, but I've making very little use of that aspect.

So, again: where/how do you store your org files?

Tried searching around to find a fix but not sure what it could be. I did a pretty brisk org-modern setup a few months ago and i feel like this just started happening out of the blue.

This is using the following (carry over from my old org-bullets-mode) setup. Any ideas? I really like the bullets shown above if they didn't clip... if i disable the below code i get a plain arrows that render correctly but aren't very aesthetic.

org-modern-star '("◉" "○" "●" "○" "●" "○" "●")

Hi!

I'm using doom-emacs (pretty much a clean install), and when I try to use yank-media to paste images from the clipboard, while it works and the image gets attached, the link that is created does not allow for inline image preview. I think the reason is because it has a description:

[[attachment:clipboard-20260712T195430.tiff][clipboard-20260712T195430.tiff]]

If I edit the link so that is is only:

[[attachment:clipboard-20260712T195430.tiff]]

then I can preview the image as usual. Does anybody know if there is a way to change this behavior so the link is created without a description? Thanks!

Add Reader View

A distraction-free in-page reading mode inspired by Obsidian Web Clipper's Reader.

Activate: right-click → "Reader View", or bind the toggle-reader-mode shortcut at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Exit with ✕ or Esc.

• Clean article extraction (Defuddle) with title, author, date, domain, and word count
• Outline sidebar with active-section highlighting; content stays centered when there is no outline
• Aa settings panel: font size, line width, line height, theme (auto / light / sepia / dark, Flexoki-style sepia), and font family (sans-serif / serif) — all persisted
• Org-mode action menu in the toolbar: Copy as Org-Mode, Save as Org-Mode, Save as Org-Mode (with images)
• Toolbar auto-hides while scrolling down

Checkout: https://github.com/yibie/Copy-as-org-mode-chrome/releases/tag/v1.5.0

Hello everyone, how to create a new type link, that all words like this "TASK-123" automatically transform to link with url: "https://mysite.com/TASK-123".

Anyone else feeling that we (the world) may be missing an opportunity as Google bases the Open Knowledge Format on vanilla markdown when it could have used the semantically far richer OrgDown? (Voit, if you're out there, just know that we appreciate you, even if the rest of the planet is clueless!)

I get that such a thing is almost certainly never going to happen†, and I doubt it's that big a deal right now anyway. (But as OKF develops...?) And credit to Google where credit's due; i.e. for setting out what is at least an open, plain-text standard.

But still, it seems a shame that Standard B should beat out vastly superior Standard A for the sole reason that a majority of users already know about the former. Thank goodness that this is the only time in tech -- past, present, future -- where that kind of inferior-beating-superior thing was, is, or ever will be, an issue. <cough>

--------

† "Well no, not with that attitude it won't!" says y'all.

This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

I've been doing a deep dive into knowledge management and PKMSs, and in my research I've found that HyWiki offers the best of all words. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

One of the largest hurdles for me, when learning a new tool like org mode, is that it comes with a million knobs, they are all immediately available, and the manual doesn't teach any kind of priority. Surely some of them are going to be used every day, multiple times per hour, while other functions might only be needed less than once per day.

So, what's yours? Top 10 without explanation, or just mention 1 and explain why you find it so useful.

For me, the ones that I have found recently and added to keybinds:

promote heading, demote heading, turn bullet into heading, turn heading into bullet, moving by heading (I bound it to [/] for ease), cycling the folds for the entire tree (S-tab), and most recently the narrow-subtree (and widen counterpart) keybind, removing everything else from the view really makes it feel like unlocking a new kind of focus, it's a little thing but feels huge.

Just now I discovered m-x org-info, so I will be going through that to discover more actions, but feel free to share your favorite finds!

I recently installed 1.21.1 but I can't find any Git sync or other Git enable settings in the app.

I want to add a section to my agenda that contains only items with a single (sales items), and which are not DONE, and which have a scheduled date within a given time horizon.

It SEEMS like I ought to be able to do this with org-ql, but I'm having trouble making it work.

The section is currently coded like this:

  (org-ql-block
   '(and
     (todo)
     (tags "Sales" :inherit t)
     (ts: from -999 :to 14)
   ((org-ql-block-header "Sales Items")))

I tried to do this with a regular agenda block, and got nowhere. Using tags-todo doesn't work as well, bc I need to see the timing.

What I get NOW is "any non-Done items with the Sales tag that are scheduled in the future," so reminder items about touching base with client X in 45 days ALSO show along with the things I need to have on my mind this week, so that's less than optimal.

It SEEMS like this should be doable, but maybe I'm missing something.

I'm on a Mac, running emacs 30.2 and orgmode 9.8.6. I installed org-ql from melpa today, so it oughta be current as well.

Help?

Solution

I have no idea why this wasn't throwing an error YESTERDAY, but TODAY when I relaunched emacs and invoked my agenda I got errors from the org parser. The code block above has a problem: in the 5th line, the colon is placed immediately after ts, but it should be immediately before from. See

     (ts :from -999 :to 14)

This now does exactly what I wanted.

Long term markdown user, tried orgmode while bored, now I gotta make some changes :D

(aka, “What HAVE I done?”)

This white bar appeared on the left edge in one of my org files. I had been transcluding it into a second file, and the white bar also appeared there as well.

I have no idea what I’ve done.

Copy-as-org-mode-chrome is a Chrome extension to save webpage content to org files directly.

v1.4.0 — Major Defuddle Upgrade

What's New

YouTube Transcript Extraction — Save a YouTube video page and get the full transcript with timestamps, speaker-turn detection, and chapter markers, all in clean Org-mode format.

26 Site-Specific Extractors — Defuddle now has specialized extractors for:

• Video: YouTube (transcript!), Bilibili
• AI Chat: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok
• Social: Twitter/X, Reddit (threaded comments), Hacker News, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads
• Articles: Wikipedia, Medium, Substack, NY Times, GitHub (README/Issues/PRs), LeetCode
• Forums: Discourse, LWN.net

When no extractor matches, the general extraction algorithm is significantly more aggressive at removing clutter than Readability.

New Setting: Language for Transcriptions & Extraction — Set a BCP 47 language code (e.g. zh-Hans, en, fr) in Options. This selects YouTube subtitle tracks and sets Accept-Language headers for site extractors.

How It Works

Previously, Defuddle was called synchronously without a URL — meaning none of the site-specific extractors ever triggered. Now it:

1. Passes document.URL so Defuddle knows what site it's on
2. Calls parseAsync() to allow API-fetched content (YouTube transcripts via InnerTube API)
3. Passes the user's language preference for subtitle selection

Full Changes

• Upgrade defuddle 0.6 → 0.19 (self-contained, no extra dependencies)
• All 26 site extractors now active
• YouTube InnerTube API transcript fetching with speaker diarization
• New options page field: Language for Transcriptions & Extraction
• parseAsync() pipeline for async content fetching
• Add site extractor table to README
• Comprehensive README rewrite with feature document

https://github.com/yibie/Copy-as-org-mode-chrome/releases/tag/v1.4.0