If you’re an experienced Emacser, the idea of using Emacs everywhere—including for school assignments—is second nature. Of course, not everyone is an experienced user. Some, like Seshal Jain, discover Emacs in the course of their studies and evolve their workflows as they go along. Jain has a useful post on how he does his programming lab assignments with Emacs and Org-mode.
He starts with explaining his pre-Emacs workflow:
- Write the code and explanation for the assignment.
- Run the program in a terminal and take a screen shot of the results.
- Paste the screen shot into some sort of word processor.
- Send the resulting PDF to the professor.
Org-mode/Babel combines all this into a single file and the whole process is run right from Emacs. This type of application is ideal for a Literate Programming approach and Org allows you to insert the results right in document and then export the file to a PDF.
Jain also shows how to add syntax highlighting to the PDF using minted and the Python Pygments package. If you’re new to Emacs and have to write up programming lab results, you should take a look at Jain’s post. It’s pretty much a step-by-step guide to setting up an Org environment that makes writing your reports as frictionless as possible.