ephone.el

Control the telephony stack of your smartphone from inside Emacs via ofono and Bluetooth.

Features

• Hangup calls & and dial phone-numbers.
• Answer incoming calls.
• Hooks for various actions.
• tel: Org-links
• Supports multiple phones.
• Supports multiple HCI Bluetooth controllers.

Demo

demo.mp4

Installation

INFO: Please make sure you have both D-BUS and ofonod installed and running before following along.

You can install ephone.el through git:

git clone https://github.com/27justin/ephone.el ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ephone.el

Then add the path to your load-path and (require) the package.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ephone.el")
(setq ephone-periodic-scan t)
(setq ephone-scan-interval "3 min")
(setq ephone-periodic-scan-break-after-found t)
(require 'ephone)
(ephone--attach-dbus-hooks)

NOTE: About ephone-periodic-scan / ephone-scan-interval.

ephone.el queries the ofono D-Bus once during ephone--attach-dbus-hooks, given this, ephone.el won’t properly attach to any device you connect **after** loading the plugin.

To circumvent this, you can either manually run M-x ephone/scan RET after connecting your phone, or facilitate the given variables.

When ephone-periodic-scan is t, ephone.el sets up a timer running every ephone-scan-interval (default 3 min), this timer will automatically call ephone/scan for you to make sure your phone keeps / gets connected to the Emacs hooks.

Additionally you may also set ephone-periodic-scan-break-after-found to t, with this ephone.el will also automatically remove it’s perodic-scan timer after attaching to one device.

After which you can re-evaluate your config, or restart Emacs.

Usage

ephone.el’s interactive functions are prefixed with ephone/.

Here an overview of said functions.

(ephone/dial "<number>")
(ephone/dial-last-number)
(ephone/hangup) ;; Also used to reject incoming calls.
(ephone/answer)
(ephone/scan)   ;; Re-fetch & attach devices from ofono

Some other non-interactive functions you might want to use.

(ephone/get-phone-number) ;; Returns the Phone-number of the active call as a string,
                          ;; or nil

Hooks

ephone.el provides the following hooks

ephone-call-hook   ;; Runs when a call is either started or received.
ephone-hangup-hook ;; Runs when a call is ended.

Examples

Open a Capture-Buffer on incoming calls

A prominent use-case may be clocking out of the current org-task and starting a capture buffer whenever a call is received, or started.

(add-to-list 'org-capture-templates ("p" "Call" entry
    (file+headline "~/org/TASKS.org" "Calls")
    "* %T %(ephone/get-phone-number)\n    %?"
    :clock-resume t :clock-in t))
(defun capture-received-call ()
    (org-capture nil "p"))
(add-hook ephone-call-hook #'capture-received-call)

Store HTML tel: inside org and immediately call them

Another fairly useful feature are tel: org-links, with similar semantics to the href Attribute on HTML <a>-tags for those familiar. Running C-c C-o / org-open-at-point on these links will run ephone/dial with the given number.