Save an org-mode buffer when I clock in/out of a task

Question

I'm using the clocking functionality quite extensively, and I built a number of tools (outside of Emacs) that will look for clocked-in tasks. The problem is that these tools will parse the file on disk, and therefore only pick up the clock entries if the buffer was saved in the meantime. I could just save the buffer manually, but I'm also using org-mru-clock, so it might not always be evident which buffer to save.

So I wanted to ask whether there is an easy way to hook into the clock-in/-out events to determine the buffer the task is in, and just save it.

Answer 1

Emacs has cool feature - defadvice. You can surround any function with your own operation.

In this case, something along the lines of

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook (lambda ()
                           (defadvice org-clock-in (after org-clock-in-after activate) (save-buffer))
                           (defadvice org-clock-out (after org-clock-out-after activate) (save-buffer))))

in your .emacs would make save-buffer happen after either clock-in or clockout.

Taken from :

• defadvice examples

• org-mode hooks examples

Answer 2

org-clock-in and org-clock-out have "hooks" associated with them --- lists of extra functions that run whenever you clock in/out. You can add your own functions (which will be called with no arugment) using add-hook:

(add-hook 'org-clock-in-hook #'save-buffer)
(add-hook 'org-clock-out-hook #'save-buffer)