Streamline Org-Mode Capture: Disable Browser Prompts for Org-Protocol

I use emacs org-mode to capture links from the browser for later reading, or for archiving. For this purpose, I use a simple bookmarklet to capture the link, title and any selected text, and then use an org-capture template to store the information. However, when i click on the bookmarklet, most browsers throw a pop-up asking for permission to open org-protocol:// links. This security check, while well-intentioned, adds friction every time I try to capture a link. Here’s how we can disable this confirmation prompt on Chromium based browsers.

On macOS

# For Google Chrome
defaults write com.google.Chrome URLAllowlist -array-add -string 'org-protocol://*'

# For Brave
defaults write com.brave.Browser URLAllowlist -array-add -string 'org-protocol://*'

On Linux

We can achieve this using enterprise policy files. This however will apply to all users on the machine for this browser.

mkdir -p /etc/opt/chrome/policies/{managed,recommended}
cat <<EOF >/etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/allow_org_protocol.json
{
  "URLAllowlist": [
    "org-protocol:*"
  ]
}
EOF

The above command works for Chrome, but Brave seems to store the policies at /etc/brave/policies, so update the paths accordingly.

To debug whether policies were loaded, go to chrome://policy or brave://policy, and check logs. You can also reload policies here without having to restart chrome/brave.