Howard Abrams has a video and associated post that updates his post on the same subject from 11 years ago. As with yesterday’s post, the video is from EmacsConf 2024 but someone just reposted it to reddit and it’s definitely worth taking a look at.
Abrams is explicit that by “literate programming” he means using code blocks and Babel in Org mode files. It’s an extremely powerful workflow. You can execute those code blocks in place or you can use org-babel-tangle to export the code to a separate file.
The majority of his video and post discuss ways of working with those Org files. One simple example is that he uses the local variables feature of Emacs files to set a hook that automatically tangles the file every time he saves it. That keeps the parent Org file and the generated code file in sync. He also has some functions that leverage Avy to find and execute a code block without changing the point’s location.
Finally, he talks about navigating his—possibly multi-file—projects. We wants to do the usual things like jumping to a function definition or getting a list of where a function is called. Emacs, of course, has functions for that but they don’t work in Org files. So Abrams wrote his own extension to the xref API based on ideas from dumb-jump.
Abrams drew all this together with a hydra that makes it easy for him to call any of his functions. He moves a bit rapidly in the video so you might want to read the post first in order to follow along. The video is 16 minutes, 38 seconds long so plan accordingly.