2024-10-30
Tags: org, emacs
I was talking with my roommate about his Org agenda workflow and he
noticed some "trivial" tasks cluttering his inbox.
These tasks required no thought, but required being at a specific
place to complete.
My roommate and I both use the wonderful iOS app beorg [1] to keep
our Org files synced to our phones so we can receive reminders and
file things into our inboxes when away from our computers.
However, beorg doesn't do anything special (to my knowledge) based
on location; that's fine by me, because it does one thing and does
it well.
Still, this got me thinking: might there be a way to tag TODOs such
that they don't show up in the agenda view, but such that I receive
a mobile notification when I'm at a location I can act on them
(e.g. grocery store)?
So I set out to create a workflow for location-based reminders in
Org-mode.
All shortcut files used in this post, along with instructions for
importing them, are provided at the bottom of this page.
== [1m[4mShortcuts[22m[24m
I had just started exploring the iOS Shortcuts app [2] a few days
prior (which I used to selectively enable a greyscale filter in
unproductive apps), and it seemed like this would be up to the
task.
Trigger a workflow on arrival to any location? Oh, this will be a
breeze!
If only we knew the suffering that would befall us next...
The first piece of the puzzle was figuring out how to activate a
shortcut when I arrived at certain location: this in and of itself
was not too hard to do, using personal automations [3].
You provide a trigger, and run an automation; it's annoying you
can't call the automation with arguments (besides your location, I
mean), but you can define wrapper shortcuts that call a location
agnostic shortcut with a particular string, for example.
(IMG) image
The second piece of the puzzle was getting the important
information from beorg; naturally, the author of beorg being a Lisp
programmer and all, beorg has a very comprehensive scripting API
and IPC interface (which he used to make his own org-capture
shortcut for Safari [4]!)
The part I care about are URL Schemes [5], which allows using the
"Open X-Callback URL" action to perform certain actions in beorg,
like adding agenda items or searching the agenda.
Using the basic beorg search syntax, [40m[35m`k r location
home`[39m[49m will search for incomplete items that have the
property [40m`location`[49m with value [40m`home`[49m (both are
case insensitive).
(GIF) image
(Oh, and don't bother with the "Show Alert" action, because you
can't customize the display or make it do anything useful when
clicking on it.)
This works great, except there was a small problem: this only works
when my phone is unlocked.
I guess executing arbitrary code without user interaction is no
bueno™, after all.
So when I walk into my lab, instead of a helpful reminder all I get
is a prompt for my password.
Even worse, this prompt shows up [3mevery[23m time I trigger the
reminder, because it needs to unlock my phone to run the query,
regardless of whether that query returns an actionable task or not.
It was time to go back to the drawing board.
== [1m[4mShortcuts, take 2[22m[24m
My thought process was this: I don't actually mind unlocking my
phone to see the specific agenda items in beorg if I know there
will be items; would it be possible to just check for the existence
of location-based reminders without unlocking my phone?
This is where this endeavour goes from neat to completely scuffed.
Not every action in a shortcut requires unlocking the phone; it
turns out that although you can't open other apps, you [3mcan[23m
read files.
All of my Org files are stored in my iCloud Drive, so I can read
them from the shortcut no problem.
The dumb (and, as it turns out, best) idea is just using a regex to
search for the value of the [40m`LOCATION`[49m property (this
does require that I'm diligent about refiling DONE items so the
only items with the [40m`LOCATION`[49m property set in my agenda
are incomplete).
This approach doesn't require PCRE or lookahead to gather
information about the task---once I know the task exists, I can
just check my agenda for more details.
(IMG) image
So running this manually on my laptop works fine; great.
(IMG) image
Now on iOS... hmmm. That's not right.
(IMG) image
The content graph on MacOS looks fine (I can even export my Org
files to PDF!), but iOS refuses to treat the files as text.
I almost gave up here after being unable to do something as simple
as write a file... iOS was very picky in what constituted a "valid
path", a problem likely exacerbated by the fact I'm mucking around
in my iCloud Drive.
But I found a shortcut someone else wrote for dumping binary media
that gave me the idea to base64 encode the Org files, which should
work on [3many[23m arbitrary bytes, regardless of filetype.
So I literally just fed the "Encode with base64" shortcut into the
"Decode with base64" shortcut, and... viola! We have our file!
The only minor hiccup I encountered was opening the X-Callback URL
would switch to the beorg app, but then immediately switch back to
Shortcuts.
The fix was opening the URL with the "Open URL" action instead of
the "Open X-Callback URL" action, which still pulls up the agenda
search view as desired.
(GIF) image
[3mNow[23m we're done.
== [1m[4mFinishing up[22m[24m
When I was writing this up, I wanted a way to easily share the
Shortcut (especially because it uses this block-based language
that's really annoying to edit).
You can share shortcuts through iCloud, but I literally just want a
plaintext file.
Trying to export a shortcut to a file will either phone home to
Apple or forcibly sign it with your contact information.
The workaround I found was thus:
1. Write an auxillary shortcut that exports shortcuts to p-lists,
and run that on the shortcut you'd like to export
2. Change the extension (of the p-list which is actually XML) from
[40m[35m`.xml`[39m[49m to [40m[35m`.shortcut`[39m[49m
This gives you an [3munsigned[23m shortcut, but you can't import
those; the receiving party must:
1. Run [40m[35m`shortcuts sign -m people-who-know-me -i
input.shortcut -o output.shortcut`[39m[49m (this signs
[40m[35m`output.shortcut`[39m[49m with your contact info,
but you can keep this as device-local copy).
Oh wait, [1mthat doesn't work[22m! The example I literally
copy and pasted straight from the docs [6] doesn't work!
Give up and resign yourself to signing with
[40m[35m`anyone`[39m[49m instead.
2. Double-click [40m[35m`output.shortcut`[39m[49m or drag it
into the Shortcuts app to import it (for some reason the "File
> Import" menu bar item doesn't seem to recognize these).
In summary:
file, and I had to [40m[35m`b64encode`[39m[49m and
[40m[35m`b64decode`[39m[49m it to prove it wasn't scary
and iOS
course[23m they do
why Apple needs to protect users from themselves
AHK users
=== [1m[4mShortcuts[22m[24m
it helpful)
automation/location manually; also, you probably want to edit the
list of keywords to determine what [40m`LOCATION`[49m values
should be matched for this location)
References:
(HTM) [1] beorg
(HTM) [2] Shortcuts app
(HTM) [3] personal automations
(HTM) [4] org-capture shortcut for Safari
(HTM) [5] URL Schemes
(HTM) [6] the docs
(HTM) [7] own Regex flavor
(HTM) [8] x-callback-url
(DIR) [9] Query beorg Location TODOs
(DIR) [10] (OLD) Query beorg Location TODOs
(DIR) [11] Example home shortcut
(DIR) [12] Shortcut to Plist
>=================================================================<
(DIR) Blog
(DIR) Writeups
(DIR) jp
copyright 2026 George Huebner
(HTM) email