Paste clipboard as image (on Windows)

I do the bigger part of my note taking in markdown. These files reside where my projects are. Now an image is often worth more than words. I snip it but I have yet to find an elegant solution to quickly save the system clipboards content as a file (automatic file naming) and insert it in Emacs at point as a reference in markdown syntax. Is there any Windows solution available?

You want something like: 1) take a snapshot with your favourite screen capture tool which stores the image in the clipboard 2) then you go to your org file (or markdown) and then via something like C-x i m you want to get: - the link created in your org file (or markdown) at point - with ad-hoc png file created in a directory If that is what you want, then this is what I do with a mix of elisp plus some powershell. Happy to share.

I also use this extensively at work and would love to see what you've written! Cheers!

Exactly that's what I need. I already have a powerful snipping tool I like, it's about writing the clipboard contents to disk an insert it a point as a local markdown link (not using org but of course, would be nice if the tool could support more than one mode)

1st part of the solution ... This part of code goes into your powershell profile. If you do not know where it is just enter in a Powershell window start notepad $profile \------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ function ImageinClipboard2File($Dest) { \# Any image available in the clipboard $img=get-clipboard -format image if ($img -ne $null) { \# Create the file and the directory if required - No Output New-Item -Path $Dest -ItemType File -Force | out-null \# Actually save the image into the file $img.save($Dest) return "Image found in clipboard and created in $Dest" } else { return "No image found in clipboard" } } \----------------------------------------------------------------

Then goes the part from your emacs configuration ;; Adding images (defvar my/screenshot-directory "./images/") ;; Key function ... Script part commented out // to be improved (defun my/take-screenshot () "This works only in Windows. Take the image in the clipboard, name it with a timestamp,and store it in png format into \`my/screenshot-directory' " (let ((filename)) (setq filename (concat my/screenshot-directory (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%S") ".png")) (message (shell-command-to-string (concat "Powershell ImageinClipboard2File -Dest " filename " "))) filename)) ;; Create the link at point in the org document ;; v1 is just inserting the link ;; v2 is adding the caption so that it is included automatically (defun my/org-screenshot () "Save a screenshot in clipboard into\`my/screenshot-directory'. Insert an Org link to the image file." (interactive) (let ((filename (my/take-screenshot))) (insert ;; (concat "\[\[file:" filename "\]\]") ;; (concat "#+ATTR\_ORG: :width 900" "\\n" "#+NAME: fig:" filename "\\n" "#+CAPTION: " filename "\\n" "\[\[file:" filename "\]\]") (concat "#+ATTR\_ORG: :height 300" "\\n" "#+NAME: fig:" filename "\\n" "#+CAPTION: " filename "\\n" "\[\[file:" filename "\]\]") ))) ;; Associate to C-c i m to get it in the org buffer (global-set-key (kbd "C-c i m") 'my/org-screenshot)

A few comments: 1) This example is powershell 5 but it works on windows with powershell 7 2) The directory where the images are saved is a subdirectory of the file you are editing. This subdirectory is called images. If you want to change that (for a global directory) just change the value of the variable my/screenshot-directory 3) Format-time-string is the place where I create the unique name which is taking the timestamp of the moment. When editing my org document, changing the caption enables me to give a user-friendly reference to the image 4) Could that work on non-windows ? Maybe yes.... 2 conditions: \- Using powershell 7 ==> I have used it on Mac so potentially OK. \- Powershell 7 is able to access the clipboard and recognise that it is an image (cf. the 1st line of the powershell code). I did not test it on Mac and non-Windows. This is the test to be made as pretty much everything else is plain vanilla Powershell or elisp. 5) I use PicPick to capture screen and edit the image. So from org I can do C-c C-o and I get the image in PicPick editor from the file linked to my org document and I can edit it add annotations and save it.... C-u C-c o to see the image in emacs Hope it helps...

For markdown - which I do not use - tweak slightly the link defined in the example.. That is now simply some tweaking of the elisp used.