The following post is part of my new Emacs Writing Setup. You can find the complete setup here: [GitHub - ballantony/emacs-writing: My Emacs Writing Setup](https://github.com/ballantony/emacs-writing)
# Capturing Notes
Like any writer I’m always capturing ideas. I used to carry a notebook everywhere, now I capture ideas on my phone using either orgzly or Evernote.
When working in Emacs I use org-capture.
GTD means capturing ideas quickly. I used to have templates to capture to different locations, I realised that this was an unnecessary step. Now I either capture everything as a TODO, either directly to my gtd file, or directly to the story file I’m currently working on.
As org-capture requires you to select a template I wrote the following two functions. The first calls org-capture with the ’t’ template preselected, the second does the same but uses let\* to change org-capture-templates to the current buffer for the current capture only.
```lisp
(defun tb/capture ()
"Capture to do without options"
(interactive)
(org-capture nil "t"))
(defun tb/capture-to-this-buffer ()
"Capture note to this buffer"
(interactive)
(cond ((not (eq major-mode 'org-mode))
(message "Can't capture to non org-mode buffer"))
(t
(let ((this-file buffer-file-name)
(org-capture-templates
`(("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline ,this-file "Captured")
"** **TODO** %?"))))
(org-capture)))))
```
# 2. Refiling Notes
org-refile makes it easy to refile notes, particularly with a completion system like Vertico. On Doom Emacs this means hitting `SPC m r r`