How to Correctly Enable Flycheck in Babel Source Blocks

If you already have Flycheck turned on then you already have it running your babel source block buffers, but, it isn’t working how you expect it. That buffer hasn’t got a file name. Flycheck can’t be smart about helping you out here. Via this post, the solution follows.

(defadvice org-edit-src-code (around set-buffer-file-name activate compile)
  (let ((file-name (buffer-file-name))) ;; (1)
    ad-do-it                            ;; (2)
    (setq buffer-file-name file-name))) ;; (3)

This is one of those things that if you had though about it for a few minutes, you would have turned it on yourself. It reveals how easy it is to return to the mode of “application user” from “application designer”, of Emacs. That is the source of most of my dumb “misses” regarding workflow optimizations in Emacs.

How to Handle and Large Slow Org Files

When some of us open large Org mode files, Emacs becomes nearly unresponsive, and nearly unusable. My stock advice has always been to call #+STARTUP: showeverything or do a binary search more or less to figure out which package is stomping Emacs. In this post, though, Puneeth explains that the issue may go away entirely for some of us.

Easily set column width in org tables

Org tables are great. Most of the time I rely on the column width auto-resizing feature. Perhaps you want to do force a smaller width though for example. Just specify the width, in its own empty row inside of angled parentheses. Default justification is right. Prefix the number with a l or c to do left or center.
Here is the page. Thanks Tory!

     |---+------------------------------|               |---+--------|
     |   |                              |               |   | <6>    |
     | 1 | one                          |               | 1 | one    |
     | 2 | two                          |     ----\     | 2 | two    |
     | 3 | This is a long chunk of text |     ----/     | 3 | This=> |
     | 4 | four                         |               | 4 | four   |
     |---+------------------------------|               |---+--------|

org-table-edit-field (C-c `) lets you easily edit the entire field and the org super key (C-c C-c) saves it.

A reference card for code execution in org 8

refcard-org-babel “contains the reference documentation that describes how to perform code execution within Org mode documents using Org Babel 8”.
Look forward to referencing this when I read about other’s personal org workflows, and, document down my own.

How to handle the enter key while inside of comment blocks

This post reveals a nice function comment-indent-new-line which gives you the
right kind of indentation for block comments. That got me wondering if my
enter key-binding should do different things depending upon whether or not the
cursor is inside of a comment block or not. Specifically, if it is, then call
the aforementioned function, else call the normal binding. This seems that it
might be an improvement

This post explains how to check if the cursor is inside of a comment block:

(nth 4 (syntax-ppss))

It is not nil when the point (cursor) is inside of a comment block.

Great to know.

I decided not to make this change yet, but, I wanted to capture how, here.

The Lenticular Text Style of Literate Programming

This announcement is pretty exciting because it reveals a new-to-me take on literate programming. The style is to store a single file as a source, and render disparate parts of that file in different buffers in a mode correct for the content.

For example you may have an Emacs Lisp file serve as the source and two separate buffers, one Emacs Lisp and one Organization (Mode), to work on the content, with all of the mode-specific assistance.

Is it a new idea? It is new to me and I am curious to find out about other approaches people have taken to realize this style.

Here is an overview and a nice video that demonstrates it.