I like having a system-wide keyboard shortcut that activates some form of text editor. That allows me to press the shortcut, type whatever I have in mind, navigate away from the editor, and get back to what I was doing. (This is sometimes called “universal capture” or “ubiquitous capture” in GTD-land.)

I’ve used lots of different programs to accomplish this over the years: NotationalVelocity/nvALT, SimpleNote, Obsidian, just to name a few. However, I wanted to combine the quick access of universal capture with the editing power of Emacs. I spent some time recently setting up my Linux laptop to accomplish this.

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