artist designer developergregnewman

If you’re an org-mode user, you’ve probably heard of org-babel by now. From the worg documentation, Org-babel extends the very excellent Org-mode with the ability to execute source code within Org-mode documents. As its name implies, Org-babel will execute code in many different languages to include emacs-lisp, ruby and python. The results of code execution — text, tables and graphics — can be used as input to other source code blocks or integrated into the powerful publishing facilities of Org-mode.

The other day on the org-mode mailing list Dan Davidson pointed out that he had been managing his dot files within org-mode documents. At that point, although I had been following the babel conversations, I had not had time to work with it. The thought of having my emacs configs in org documents intrigued me. What will that do for me besides eat up a few hours of my time? What it does is allow me to have my configs in an outline structure with folding, notes, hyperlinks to documentation and if I want to have todo’s within my configs I can allow Org-mode to add those to my agenda. Ok, a little nerdy but what the bacon!

So I spent Friday evening redoing my setup. I have a copy of my new emacs dot files up on bitbucket for anyone who wants to dig deeper. It’s close to what I was using before but I will be spending more time on it over the next few weeks. If anyone wants a github mirror leave a comment and I’ll create one.

How to set it up?

I’m not going to duplicate the efforts of the Babel developers. The worg documentation site was enough to get me going and Eric Schulte has a forked version of Phil Hagelberg’s emacs-starter-kit for great examples.

Note: Not too long ago org-babel was merged into org-mode as an official package but you can follow development at Eric Schulte’s github project.