writing and blogging with org-mode

Already in some previous entry I sang the praises about org-mode, the emacs-mode that is such a nice, flexible way to organize your life. There is so much in org-mode that it's quite hard to fit in here, but thankfully org-mode is documented very well; there's not only the reference manual, there is also a lot of user-provided documentation about how they use org-mode. A nice recent example of that is Bernt Hansen's Org Mode - Organize Your Life In Plain Text!.

I use org-mode for time-management too - I'm using it in a rather simple fashion compared to Bernt Hansen, but find it very useful. I also use org-mode for writing webpages and blogs (like this one), and that is what I'd like to discuss here.

Actually the first time I heard about this org-mode-thing people were raving about, it was for taking notes. Curious as I am, the next time I needed to take notes, I uttered M-x org-mode to try it out, and found how easy and natural it is to write structured, semi-rich-text with org-mode. Some examples:

Markup

I can write headings by starting lines with some stars, the number of stars determining the heading level:

* level 1 heading
  some text
** level 2 heading
   some more text
*** level 3 heading
    even more

org-mode helpfully gives them some different colors; by pressing TAB when I am on a heading, I can hide/show the lower levels and the contents. Nice!

It's also easy to get all the basic markup by decorating your words a bit:

This is *bold* /italics/ _underline_ [[http:/emacs-fu.blogspot.com][Emacs-Fu]]

In org-mode it looks like:

This is *bold* /italics/ _underline_ Emacs-Fu

There are many more things; for example, there's the table editor; I simply type |country|capital|<Enter>|-<Tab> and I get:

| country | capital |
|---------+---------|
|         |         |

Now, I fill in the names in the colums, ending each line with <Alt><Enter> (or M-RET), and org-mode takes care of making everything fit, so we get:

| country     | capital   |
|-------------+-----------|
| finland     | helsinki  |
| netherlands | amsterdam |

You can even insert formulae in the cells, turning this into a simple kind of spreadsheet. Haven't used that yet though.

Blogging

Now, one of the things I use org-mode for is blogging; for that, I need to convert the org-text into HTML; this is simple org-export-as-html (or C-c C-e). I can then copy the HTML into blogger.com or whatever (that might be automatable). You can also export to plain-text, LaTex and other formats.

I found that it makes me a much more productive blogger if can use org-mode; it's so much more convenient to write the mark-up than to write raw HTML. Now, sometimes I might want still want to write some raw HTML, but that can be easily done:

#+BEGIN_HTML
   <button onclick="alert('you are!');">I feel lucky!</button> 
#+END_HTML

in the export HTML this will become: How cool is that?!

However, I only found out about the nicest trick very recently from the org-mailing list.

In this blog, I often use blurbs of code; I'd like to show those blurbs with the syntax-highlighting that emacs gives me. For that, I use the htmlize-package. For example, when showing some Emacs-Lisp code, I would copy that to an Emacs-Lisp buffer, then run htmlize-region on the code, and finally copy the result back in a raw-html block (like the one for the <button>).

I wondered - could I not do that automatically? I could mark code in org-mode as being 'Emacs-Lisp'-code (or Perl, or Python, or …), and when I'd export the html, org-mode would go through the trouble of calling htmlize-region on it and use that in its output. Sounded like a nice idea, I asked for some advise on how to do it.

Five minutes after asking, I got a reply – 'just use #+BEGIN_SRC/#+END_SRC'. Wow – it was already there in org-mode, it's even documented, but somehow I missed that. So, now I can write:

#+BEGIN_SRC perl
   for (my $i = 0; $i != 10; ++i) {
        print "hello, world!\n";
   }
#+END_SRC

#+BEGIN_SRC c++
  for (int i = 0; i != 10; ++i)
        std::cout << "hello, world!" << std::endl;
#+END_SRC

and in the export HTML, this will look like:

for (my $i = 0; $i != 10; ++i) {
      print "hello, world!\n";
}

for (int i = 0; i != 10; ++i)
      std::cout << "hello, world!" << std::endl;

I am impressed.

These were just some of the things I've discovered in the last few months of using org-mode, and I am only scratching the surface. Feel free to share your org-mode-writing tips in the comments :-)