Irreal

One of the nice things about Org mode is that “You’ll never have to write HTML again.” That’s not quite true, of course, but it mostly is. Just write in Org markdown, including tables, and then export it to HTML all from the comfort of Emacs. That’s how Irreal gets published everyday.

If you know a bit about writing non-trivial Web pages, you may want to embed some JavaScript in the final HTML. I do this all the time when I embed a tweet in a post. When I tell Twitter that I want to embed a tweet, it gives me the code (surrounded by <script>, </script>) that I include in the post by simply putting it between #+BEGIN_EXPORT HTML and #+END_EXPORT tags in my Org source. That’s easy because Twitter provides all the code I need.

But what if you want to add your own JavaScript? That’s pretty easy too. You just type <h Tab to get the export tags and then Ctrl+' to be put in a buffer where you can write your JavaScript. That’s fine but there are a couple of problems. First the editing buffer you get put in is in HTML mode not JavaScript mode so you don’t get the syntax highlighting and the other benefits of JavaScript mode. Secondly you have to add all the <script>, </script> boilerplate by hand. Finally, it’s not how you embed source for other languages in an Org document so it’s a special case.

Over at the Emacs reddit, oantolin provides a really nice fix for this. With just a few lines of Elisp he adds JavaScript to the languages that Babel knows about. Now when you want to embed some JavaScript, you just put it in a Babel source block as you would with any other supported language. When you type Ctrl+' you get put in JavaScript mode and the boilerplate will be inserted for you when you execute the block.

What’s really amazing about all this is how easy it is; take a look and see. I hope the Org folks add this to the code base so it will be available without adding the Elisp to your init.el. Even if they don’t, it’s such a minimal amount of code that it’s not much of a burden to add it yourself.

John Kitchin has a very nice post and video demonstrating some of the new link features in Org Mode 9. It’s now easy to create custom link types and control the display, look, and action of the resulting links. You can, for example, choose the color you want for the link or what gets displayed in the tool tip, even making it dynamic.

As an example, Kitchin demonstrates a better file link that asks you what you want to do when you follow it. You can, for example, open it as usual, open it in Dired, copy the path, or any other action that makes sense.

A link’s look and action are controlled by a set of properties, which can be individually set for each link type. Here’s a list of the properties cut from org.el.

:follow - A function that takes the link path as an argument.

:export - A function that takes the link path, description and
export-backend as arguments.

:store - A function responsible for storing the link.  See the
function `org-store-link-functions'.

:complete - A function that inserts a link with completion.  The
function takes one optional prefix arg.

:face - A face for the link, or a function that returns a face.
The function takes one argument which is the link path.  The
default face is `org-link'.

:mouse-face - The mouse-face. The default is `highlight'.

:display - `full' will not fold the link in descriptive
display.  Default is `org-link'.

:help-echo - A string or function that takes (window object position)
as arguments and returns a string.

:keymap - A keymap that is active on the link.  The default is
`org-mouse-map'.

:htmlize-link - A function for the htmlize-link.  Defaults
to (list :uri \"type:path\")

:activate-func - A function to run at the end of font-lock
activation.  The function must accept (link-start link-end path bracketp)

There isn’t very much documentation on how to use this new facility so Kitchin’s post is really useful if you want to take advantage of link properties. Have a look at Kitchin’s video to get an idea of what’s possible. It’s 10 minutes long so it won’t be hard to schedule some time to watch.

Org Mode version 9.0 has been released and is ready for update. Take a look at the Changes file to see what’s new. I’ve had it installed for less than an hour as I write this so it’s a little too early to draw any conclusions.

The only issue I’ve had to deal with is the new Export block syntax. That’s explained near the top of the Change file and basically involves writing things like

#+BEGIN_EXPORT html

#+END_EXPORT

instead of

#+BEGIN_HTML

#+END_HTML

The shortcuts (<h Tab in this case) will give you the proper syntax so you need worry only about fixing up old files that you want to export. Happily, the Change file includes a bit of Elisp that will do that for you. I just pasted it into my init.el file for the time being so that I can easily fix any files I need to. That would mostly be old blog posts that I want to post an update to but there are a couple of others that I’ll need to fix the next time I export them.

There are a few other non-backward compatible changes but they probably won’t affect many people. Be sure to look at beginning (at least) of the Changes file to make sure you aren’t affected.

Many thanks to Bastien and the other developers for all their hard work. Org keeps getting better and better and I wouldn’t be nearly as productive without it.

Yesterday, I wrote about Lee Hinman’s EOS Emacs configuration and mentioned that because the configuration is factored into modules, it’s easy to adapt them to our own configurations. An example of this is Hinman’s Org Mode configuration. It’s a treasure trove of configuration items that I didn’t know about but that can be very useful.

One example, that I immediately implemented, is the org-special-ctrl-a/e variable. By setting that to t, Ctrl+a and Ctrl+e will ignore stars and tags when moving to the beginning and end of a header line. A subsequent Ctrl+a or Ctrl+e will move to the absolute beginning or end of the line.

There are several other similar useful configurations and if, like me, you do a great deal of your work in Org mode, you’ll want to implement some of them yourself. In general, if you’re an Org user—and you should be—you should definitely take a look at Hinman’s configuration. As I say, it’s full of good ideas.