Life has officially gotten in the way of this blog. Increased load at work and the birth of a second child will do that I guess. In order to combat my lack of free time I’ve decided to get organized, and what better way to do that than with org mode.

I use org-capture to capture any personal or work related tasks or notes, even entries to this blog (rarely…). I won’t cover org-capture in this post as there is already plenty of great material about it online. The problem I’d like to tackle with this post is that org-capture works great when I’m at my desktop, but what about when I’m out and about on my phone?

Orgzly to the rescue. Orgzly is an excellent org mode-centric Android application, with which you can create notes, schedule tasks, set reminders, etc. The problem is that it only allows syncing of notebooks (.org files) by one of three methods, namely: Dropbox, Weaved or a local directory. Seeing as I didn’t fancy the first two options, only option number 3 remained. For this one tool came to mind, Syncthing. Syncthing is an open source continuous file synchronization program, think rsync but more user friendly and more easily cross-platform.

To install syncthing follow the installation instructions for your OS on their website, or if you’re on Arch Linux install the package from the Extra repository.

pacman -S syncthing

Next, enable and start the syncthing systemd service.

$ systemctl --user enable --now syncthing.service
Created symlink /home/odin/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/syncthing.service → /usr/lib/systemd/user/syncthing.service.

To configure syncthing, it’s easiest to go to the web interface, which is accessible at http://localhost:8384/ by default. From there, enter the path of your org folder, give it a label, and optionally a different ID.

Figure 1: Add your local org folder.

Figure 1: Add your local org folder.

Once you click save your org folder will be ready to be shared with your other devices.

Figure 2: Org folder ready for sharing and synchronizing.

Figure 2: Org folder ready for sharing and synchronizing.

Adding a new device can be done from either syncthing client, I chose to add my Linux host from my Android device as I could then easily scan the QR code provided. The device’s ID and QR code can be found under Actions->Show ID.

Figure 3: QR code to identify your device

Figure 3: QR code to identify your device

To add a device from the Android client, navigate to the Devices tab and then press the + in the top right. From there simply scan the QR code displayed by your host.

Figure 4: Add device on syncthing android by scanning the host QR code.

Figure 4: Add device on syncthing android by scanning the host QR code.

After adding the device a popup will be displayed on host prompting you to add it. Accept the request and optionally provide the device a name.

Figure 5: Add new device on syncthing host.

Figure 5: Add new device on syncthing host.

Once the device has been added you can share your org folder with it. To do this, Edit the folder, navigate to the Sharing tab and check the desired device(s).

Figure 6: Share folder with newly added device.

Figure 6: Share folder with newly added device.

Upon saving, you’ll receive a notification of any added devices prompting you to accept or ignore the new share. Select or create a local folder to sync your .org files to, I created an Org folder in the root directory. Also ensure that Watch for changes is toggled on.

Figure 7: Add the newly shared folder to syncthing.

Figure 7: Add the newly shared folder to syncthing.

If everything went well, the syncthing web UI should show both your folders and added devices as Up to Date.

Figure 8: Folder sync complete.

Figure 8: Folder sync complete.

The final step is to link Orgzly to your local Org folder. To do this, navigate to Settings → Sync → Repositories and then add + a new Directory repository by browsing to your local Org folder. To sync your notebooks either enable auto sync or drag down from the Notebook view.

Figure 9: Orgzly notebooks synced correctly.

Figure 9: Orgzly notebooks synced correctly.

With that we’re done. Go forth and create, schedule, modify and complete TODOs or notes from any device - synchronized!