How do you copy text with hyperlinks (text is not the link, the link is embedded (href style)), with the links into org mode?

Question

I am copying text from a browser (from an email) which has hyperlinks such as link text - but the links do not get hyperlinked as in the email. I just see 'link text' when I paste to my org file. How do I achieve this?

I'm on doom emacs

Answer 1

If you were looking at the email in emacs itself (using e.g. gnus or mu4 or one of the other email programs in emacs) and you had set up the suggested global keybindings in Org mode, you could visit the link in emacs (e.g. using eww), then C-c l to remember it and then C-c C-l in the Org mode file to insert it (with the choice to give it a label as well).

You can set up org-protocol in a browser (see e.g. the description in the manual and some setup instructions here - N.B. I have not tried them, so I don't know how well they work: YMMV), so that you could save links and arbitrary text, but that does take some fiddling to set it up, different browsers require different setup and IME it often breaks. OTOH, I haven't tried it in some years and so things might have improved since then.

But you can always do it manually: copy the link in your browser (e.g. bring up the context menu by right-clicking on the link and select "Copy Link" in Firefox), then paste it into your emacs and surround it with [[...]], e.g. [[https:///www.duckduckgo.com]] - in Org mode, everything is just text after all - Org mode makes it look pretty (and does some other pretty amazing things as well) but you can always just type it in. You can prettify it a bit, by giving it a description: [[https:///www.duckduckgo.com][Search]]. You can even type the link by hand if you want as I did here, so this method, although somewhat tedious, is completely general.