Simple org-clock and gnome/pidgin integration

22 Oct 2014 | code emacs orgmode

See update below

I have been trying to get back to using org-mode and its clocking functionality, more often than not. I used to use it a lot, a few years ago, and haven’t been using it, since I had been in my last job.

To help with it, I decided to integrate clocking in and out with changing status on Pidgin, and turning notifications on and off in Gnome. Here’s a few lines of code that does this for me.


(defadvice org-clock-in (after pc/org-clock-in (&optional select start-time))
  "Turn gnome notifications off."
  (dbus-send-signal
   :session
   "org.gnome.SessionManager"
   "/org/gnome/SessionManager/Presence"
   "org.gnome.SessionManager.Presence"
   "SetStatus" 2)
  (shell-command "purple-remote setstatus?status=unavailable"))

(defadvice org-clock-out (after pc/org-clock-out (&optional switch-to-state fail-quietly at-time))
  "Turn gnome notifications back on."
  (dbus-send-signal
   :session
   "org.gnome.SessionManager"
   "/org/gnome/SessionManager/Presence"
   "org.gnome.SessionManager.Presence"
   "SetStatus" 0)
  (shell-command "purple-remote setstatus?status=available"))

Update <2014-11-01 Sat>

@baali tried to use my code, and it turns out it didn’t work for him, because I forgot to mention that (ad-activate 'org-clock-in) needs to be run, after the defadvice code. I have no idea how it worked for me, without doing that. May be because I have defadvice for other functions?

Also, while debugging this, I found that defadvice is a deprecated way of doing this, and add-function is the way to go now. But, instead of advising the function, I decided to make use of org-clock-in-hook.

Here is the new code.

(defun pc/turn-off-notifications ()
  "Turn gnome notifications off."
  (dbus-send-signal
   :session
   "org.gnome.SessionManager"
   "/org/gnome/SessionManager/Presence"
   "org.gnome.SessionManager.Presence"
   "SetStatus" 2)
  (shell-command "purple-remote setstatus?status=unavailable"))

(defun pc/turn-on-notifications ()
  "Turn gnome notifications back on."
  (dbus-send-signal
   :session
   "org.gnome.SessionManager"
   "/org/gnome/SessionManager/Presence"
   "org.gnome.SessionManager.Presence"
   "SetStatus" 0)
  (shell-command "purple-remote setstatus?status=available"))

(add-hook 'org-clock-in-hook 'pc/turn-off-notifications)
(add-hook 'org-clock-out-hook 'pc/turn-on-notifications)