org-mode notes
Table of Contents
- Org mode notes
- Further reading
- Basic markup
- TODO Command line usage
- Configuration
- TODO Citation engine
- Using LaTeX
- Source code
- HTML export from header
- HTML export from body
- HTML export: attributes
- Images
- Publishing to HTML: How this site is generated
- Computational notebooks
- Literate programming with noweb
- Figures
- Beamer
- Quotation
- Tables
- Table of contents
- Macros
- Agenda
- Links
Org mode notes
Further reading
Tutorials and blog posts
Basic markup
_foo_
will underline the text: foo*foo*
will make the text bold: foo/foo/
will italicise the text: foo[[target][label]]
will generate links
Lists, enumerations and descriptions
- Use
-
or*
to start a list and thenS-<right>
to move cycle through the various list types: ordered or unordered. - For a description style list use
::
to separate the name and its description.
TODO Command line usage
Literate programming
If README.org
is a literate program, the source can be tangled out with the
following
emacs README.org --batch --eval="(org-babel-tangle)"
And to weave some HTML use the following
emacs README.org --batch --eval="(org-html-export-to-html)"
Creating slides
emacs slides.org --batch --eval="(org-beamer-export-to-latex)"
Configuration
This configuration is explained in detail in the Summary of In-Buffer Settings. A sensible header for an org-mode file should contain the following:
#+title:
#+Time-stamp: <>
#+startup: overview
#+options: toc:nil
with#+toc: headlines 2
#+options: num:nil
You might use #+startup: noinlineimages
if you do not want images to
display in the window by default. This can be very useful if you have
figures too big to fit on the screen.
You can also use #+html_head:
to add snippets to the head during
HTML export. This is particularly helpful if you want to include
additional CSS in the exported pages. This is explained in more detail
here.
TODO Citation engine
As stated here.
Org 9.5 provides a new library oc.el which provides tooling to handle citations in Org, e.g., activate, follow, insert, and export them, respectively called "activate", "follow", "insert" and "export" capabilities. Libraries responsible for providing some, or all, of these capabilities are called "citation processors".
The manual contains a few pointers to let you start and you may want to check this blog post. If you need help using this new features, please ask on the mailing list.
Thanks to Nicolas Goaziou for implementing this, to Bruce D'Arcus for helping him and to John Kitchin for paving the way with org-ref.el.
Define the bibliography
Use #+bibliography: <my-refs.bib>
to define the bibtex file to use.
TODO Define the citation processor
Use #+cite_export:
to define the processor to use. It looks like this should be
customised subtantially, but the csl
option seemed to work nicely out of the
box.
Inserting references
There is the org-cite-insert
function to insert a reference. Note that once you
have selected the citations to include use M-RET
to actually include them in the
text. Alternatively, they can be included manually as a semicolon seperated list
of @key
values.
[cite:@authorYYYYtitle;@authorYYYYtitle]
Print the bibliography
Use #+print_bibliography:
at the end of the document to print the bibliography
there.
Using LaTeX
Amazingly, you can use latex environments without any issue and they should be handled correctly in both latex and HTML export.
Source code
The following table is derived from this documentation.
Language | Identifier |
---|---|
Emacs Lisp | emacs-lisp |
LaTeX | latex |
Org mode | org |
Python | python |
R | R |
shell | sh |
Haskell | haskell |
Org mode | org |
Graphviz | dot |
HTML export from header
org-mode has functionality for exporting to HTML. The default maths support is
good. If you want to include CSS this can be done by including a HTML_HEAD
definition. For example, this page has the following line at the top of the
file.
#+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/stylesheet.css" />
If you were to use a different CSS file you would need to change the
href
. For example, on some other pages I use the following:
#+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="../../resources/nicemacs-favicon.png"> #+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/milligram/1.4.1/milligram.css"> #+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../microgram.css">
HTML export from body
If you want to incorporate a small snippet of HTML into the exported HTML use
the #+begin_export html
snippet to include that elements.
HTML export: attributes
There is the #+attr_html:
declaration to specify how things should be exported
to HTML. For example
#+attr_html: :width 700px ./path/to/image.png
will export the image with the additional attribute that the width should be 700 pixels.
Images
See Figures.
Publishing to HTML: How this site is generated
The code is used to configure the generation of this site looks roughly like the following snippet. For the version of the code actually used, check out my nicemacs.
(require 'ox-publish) (setq org-publish-project-alist '( ("org-notes" :base-directory "~/public-site/org/" :base-extension "org" :publishing-directory "~/aezarebski.github.io/" :recursive t :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html :headline-levels 4 :auto-preamble t ) ("org-static" :base-directory "~/public-site/org/" :base-extension "css\\|js\\|png\\|jpg\\|gif\\|pdf\\|mp3\\|ogg\\|swf\\|txt\\|cur\\|svg\\|csv\\|json" :publishing-directory "~/aezarebski.github.io/" :recursive t :publishing-function org-publish-attachment ) ("org" :components ("org-notes" "org-static")))) (org-publish "org")
The org-publish-project-alist
is the main variable that needs to be set for
publishing. Each element of this list describes one destination of the
publishing process. Destinations form a hierarchy as can be seen in the "org"
element which takes "org-notes"
and "org-static"
as components.
The base-directory
is where to look for source files and the
publishing-directory
is destination for the results.
Computational notebooks
Notebook example 1
The following demonstrates how org-mode can be used as a notebook for R. Note that
Evaluate an expression and cache the values as =x=. #+name: x \#+begin_src R :cache yes mean(1:10) \#+end_src #+RESULTS[57c60ad6be3794c58f0a94dc3c107a692489cb2b]: x : 5.5 Carry out an action using the variable =x= \#+begin_src R :var x = x print(x) \#+end_src #+RESULTS: : 5.5
Notebook example 2
Another example which makes use of sessions and output files to facilitate
viewing plots within the file is given below. To make it easier to specify which
R session you want to evaluate the code in there is the rename-buffer
function.
To acutually evaluate evaluate the code there is org-babel-execute-buffer
. If
you have set :session
this will evaluate it in that specified session.
#+header: :width 300 :height 300 \#+begin_src R :session *R-demo* :file 2.png :results graphics file :tangle demo.R library(ggplot2) g <- ggplot(iris) + geom_point(mapping = aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Petal.Width, colour = Species)) print(getwd()) print(g) \#+end_src
Notebook example 3
In this example we use :exports both
to ensure that both the code and the
resulting output are exported.
#+header: :exports both \#+begin_src maxima :results output a : (x* exp(-aa) + y + y * exp(-aa))/ (y*exp(-aa) + x); b : ratsimp(a); c : collectterms(expand(num(b)), exp(aa)) / denom(b); d : block( [ea: exp(-aa)], collectterms(expand(ea * num(b)), ea) / expand(ea * denom(b)) ); display(a, b, c, d); \#+end_src #+RESULTS: #+begin_example - aa - aa %e y + y + %e x a = ----------------------- - aa %e y + x aa (%e + 1) y + x b = ---------------- aa y + %e x aa %e y + y + x c = -------------- aa y + %e x - aa %e (y + x) + y d = ------------------ - aa %e y + x #+end_example
Literate programming with noweb
The default behaviour when using noweb syntax is that it will be expanded when
tangling and exporting. If you want to keep expansion on tangle but not on
export set :noweb no-export
as shown in the following example.
{ "foo": "bar" }
which is produced by the following orgmode
#+name: foobar #+begin_src javascript :noweb yes { "foo": "bar" } \#+end_src
Note that the block gets the name foobar
which we can then reference in the
following block
{
"fleeb":
<<foobar>>
}
This was itself produced by the following
\#+name: mainjs \#+begin_src javascript :noweb no-export :tangle ../misc/silly-example.json { "fleeb": <<foobar>> } \#+end_src
Tangling this produces the following JSON
{ "fleeb": { "foo": "bar" } }
Figures
org-toggle-inline-images
will toggle the display of figures in an org
document. To change the size of the displayed image use the following
#+attr_org: :width 450px #+attr_html: :width 450px
For export there are other commands you might want to issue. See for example the HTML attributes.
Linking
Use #+name: fig:cool-name
to label a figure and then [[fig:cool-name]]
to
reference it. You can use this to name an equation and then link back to it from else where in
the document.
Beamer
The command org-beamer-export-to-latex
produces a TEX file from your ORG file.
So, given your presentation is in slides.org
use the following to create a PDF
emacs slides.org --batch --eval="(org-beamer-export-to-latex)"
pdflatex slides.tex
There are slightly shorter ways to do this, but having the intermediate TEX is good for fine tuning the resulting slides.
NOTE if there are TODO
items in the slides, these seem to break the export.
Quotation
This is achieved with #+begin_quote
and #+end_quote
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler —Albert Einstein
Tables
org-table-create
Table of contents
Removing the table of contents
To remove the table of contents from an org-mode export add the following definition to the top of the file.
#+OPTIONS: toc:nil
Configuring the table of contents
If you want to label headers down to level x
and include them down to level y
in
your table of contents, the following configuration can be added to the top of
the org file.
#+options: num:x toc:y
Macros
Define a macro at the top of the file
#+MACRO: name replacement text $1, $2 are arguments
Use it with {{{name(arg1, arg2)}}}
.
Agenda
The agenda files are used to track TODO
items. Use org-agenda-file-to-front
to
add an org-mode file to the list of agenda files. If you are ever in doubt about
which files are in the adgenda, use SPC h d v
and request org-agenda-files
.
Items in a TODO
list can be prioritised by adding an annotation of [#<A|B|C>]
.
There are only three levels available by default, and if no annotation is used
it is assumed to be level B.
To make it easier to schedule items, bind org-schedule
to SPC o o s
([o]wner-[o]rg-[s]chedule) which will bring up a calendar to select the date.
You can hold S
and then use the arrow keys to navigate the calendar. Times can
be added in 24-hour format to the end of the date. This will add a SCHEDULED
property under that item. If you want to add a time to the task, put it after
the date. The +1w
in the example below means that you want the task to be
repeated each week. There are y,m,w,d
for year, month, week and day (see here
for details).
SCHEDULED: <2022-09-18 Sun 14:00 +1w>
The following settings ensure that a sensible amount of material is shown in the agenda: items from up to 3 days ago and over a 30 day span in total.
(setq org-agenda-start-day "-3d") (setq org-agenda-span 30) (setq org-agenda-start-on-weekday nil)
The org-todo-keywords
variable is used to specify the different TODO types.
The pipe, |
, in the following example is used to designate that "DONE"
is
the only keyword which indicates that a task is finished. It is probably easiest
to use customise to set these variables.
'(org-todo-keywords '((sequence "TODO" "BLOCKED" "DONE")))
Agenda view keys
- To navigate up and down lines in the agend view use
n/p
. v d
will show the day view.v w
the week view.v m
the month view.v SPC
resets the view..
goes to today.j
will jump to a date (selected via calendar).
Links
Using Properties for Custom Identifiers in Org-mode
In org-mode, you can add custom identifiers to sections using properties. A custom identifier is a unique tag that you assign to a section.
Custom identifiers make it easier to link to parts of a document and Org will use the custom identifier you've assigned instead of generating a random ID when exporting the HTML. This feature allows for clearer referencing of sections.
Here's how you can use it:
/** Foobar /:PROPERTIES: /:CUSTOM_ID: my-custom-id /:END: The section is referenced [[#my-custom-id][here]].
With this approach, if you link to "here", it will take you to the
"Foobar" section. And when you export this Org document to HTML, the
link will still correctly point to the "Foobar" section thanks to the
CUSTOM_ID
property.
With tags
To link items within a document, create a tag with <<my-tag-id>>
and then
reference it with [[my-tag-id][what gets shown]]
. By default, when you follow
a link in an org file to another org file it will open the file in a new window.
This behaviour is specified by the variable org-link-frame-setup
and can be
customized to visit the file in the current window.
To follow a link, by default emacs will attempt to use external programs before
defaulting to opening it in emacs. When this happens it consults the variable
org-link-frame-setup
for a specification of how to manage frames and windows.
There is good documentation for this variable, I use the following setting
'(org-link-frame-setup '((vm . vm-visit-folder-other-frame) (vm-imap . vm-visit-imap-folder-other-frame) (gnus . org-gnus-no-new-news) (file . find-file) (wl . wl-other-frame)))
Headers in org-mode files
To link to the Hackage section of my haskell notes I would use the following
[[file:./haskell-notes.org::*Hackage][this]]
Which will generate a link like this.