Fireforg, a Firefox extension for org interaction (EXPERIMENTAL)

The following notes should be taken into consideration before using Fireforg:

• On the Emacs side a registry of all links in the agenda files will be generated and saved in plain text onto the harddrive.
  • The generation can take very a long time depending on the size of the agenda files and the number of links in them.
  • The generated file can become quite large.
  • When files are encrypted having some information from them in plain text on the harddrive might not be what you want.
• Firefox will read and look through the registry file for the currently viewed site. Depending on the size of the registry file and on the options Lookup links on page load and Prefetch links to extract DOI this might slow down the browsing experience.

• Install org-protocol according to its manual and please verify that it’s working using either the bookmarks or by invoking it directly in the shell:

  emacsclient 'org-protocol://remember://w/http%3A%2F%2Forgmode.org%2F/Org-Mode%3A%20Your%20Life%20in%20Plain%20Text%20-%20Mozilla%20Firefox/'
  

• Get fireforgrepofile:lisp/org-fireforg.el and put the following into your .emacs after the section that initializes org-protocol:

  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/to/org/fireforg/")
  (require 'org-fireforg)
  (org-fireforg-registry-insinuate)
  

  and as the last line of the file:

  (org-fireforg-registry-initialize t)
  

  Note that creating the registry can take a long time depending on the size of the agenda files and the number of links in them.

• Visit fireforgrepofile:build/fireforg.xpi with Firefox, confirm installation of the extension and restart.

  (Windows users will have to adjust: org-fireforg-registry-file-xml in Emacs and “registry-file” in Fireforgs preferences to be the same file.)

Fireforg is able to retrieve BibTex entries for the all sites supported by Zotero. To achieve this the following additional steps are necessary:

• Install Zotero 1.0.10 from the Zotero Website

• Set “Inject Zotero” in Fireforg’s preference dialog ¹.

  Warning: On restart a small function is injected into Zotero to catch imported entries. The change to the code is minimal and non-permanent. In a worst case scenario Zotero’s database might get corrupted, though that hasn’t happened yet.

• Restart Firefox

  Whenever a single entry (not a collection) is imported into Zotero - e.g. by clicking the white “document” symbol that appears to the right in the url bar if Zotero supports importing the current site - it is automatically exported to BibTeX and sent to org mode using org-protocol. In Emacs it is put into the kill ring in a format depending on the variable org-fireforg-received-bibtex-format:

• nil: The BibTeX entry is passed directly into the kill ring.

• heading (Default): A heading is generated with the BibTeX fields as properties with prefix “BIB_”:

  * [[<link to site>][<Title>]]
   :PROPERTIES:
    :CUSTOM_ID: <BibTeX key>
    :BIB_entryType: <article, ...>
    :BIB_author: ...
    :BIB_title: ...
    ...
    :END:
  

• headingWithPropsAndBibTeXContent: a heading with properties as described above is generated and the entry in BibTeX format is appended.

• headingWithBibTeXContent: same as the previous one but without the properties

  If the ’url’ field is a static URL, the link to it will be highlighted in search results in every search engine. Otherwise the option Match sites by comparing their DOI with saved bibliography entries might help.

  To export BibTeX information from all headings in the current buffer with at least the “BIB_entryType” property call:

• org-fireforg-export-bibtex-to-file to export to a file
• org-fireforg-export-bibtex-to-new-buffer to export into a new buffer

Fireforg’s preference dialogue is accessible in Firefox’s menu under Tools->Add-ons->Fireforg->Preferences

A long known bug in Firefox on the Mac is reported to stop protocol registration from working. To work around this Fireforg is able to write the org-protocol urls to a temporary file, that is read every second and, if non empty, passed to emacsclient and emptied.

To enable this:

• check “Enable workaround for Mac” in Fireforg’s preference dialogue
• get pull.sh from https://repo.or.cz/w/org-fireforg.git and run it.

To avoid confusion, always update both org-fireforg.el and the plugin.

The plugin has to be uninstalled and then reinstalled as described above. Automatic updating will be used when the testing phase is over.

• Discussions go to the org-mode list.
• Bugreports are better not sent to the list, but rather directly to the author (Please add “[Fireforg]” to the subject.).

Different instances of Zotero’s Translator object seem to share state in a non-obvious way. This makes coding very fragile and even lets some imports fail (silently) after Fireforg has injected its code. The failure when importing collections is somehow related to this. While I find it a strange design choice, it is not in my power to change it.