Re: A tidy file maketh a tidy mind?

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

'Mash <mashdot@toshine.net> writes:

> Morning,
>
> I just want to know if there is there exists a 'tidy' module/command
> that can be run on a file to tidy it?
>
> I often find myself going back and adding extra line breaks and
> padding, and wondering if there exists something that can do this for
> me?
>

While this doesn't exist currently, it should be fairly easy to
implement a set of rules which operate over the parsed file
representation generated by org-element.  This may be used to convert an
Org-mode buffer into an elisp list, manipulate the list, and then insert
the results as text back into a new buffer.

The code could look something like the following

    ;; -*- emacs-lisp -*-
    (let ((buf (org-element-parse-buffer))) ;; convert current buffer to ELisp
      (dolist (rule cleanup-rules) ;; run cleanup transformations on the buffer
        (setq buf (funcall rule buf)))
      (delete-region (point-min) (point-max)) ;; replace the buffer contents
      (insert (org-element-interpret-data buf))) ;; with the cleaned results

The only catch would be deciding what to add to the cleanup-rules.

Also, since Org-mode is plain text, I bet a couple of lines of sed or
perl could get you most of the way to a clean buffer.

Best,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte