Re: emacs & org mode for scholars questions

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

On Tuesday, 25 Aug 2015 at 06:48, Thomas S.Dye wrote:

[...]

> If you'll be talking to Emacs developers, then my advice would be to
> thank them for their good work.  The stable platform they've developed
> supports the most congenial scholarly writing environment I can
> imagine.

[...]

> established by Org mode's creator, Carsten Dominik, a scholar and writer
> himself. Early on, he recognized the potential of Babel and the support
> and guidance he offered Eric Shulte and Dan Davison were integral to the

+1 to all of the above.  We don't say this often enough probably: many
thanks are owed to all of the above people including the very many emacs
developers as you say.  I am reminded of this every time I have to use
something like MS Office tools or Libreoffice for some task...

> It would be great to have a customization tool whose effects are
> buffer local, sensitive to the task at hand, and easily accessed by
> the user.

I increasingly have

,----
| # Local Variables:
| # eval: (esf/execute-startup-block)
| # End:
`----

at the bottom of my org files to do just that, putting document specific
settings in an (Emacs lisp) org babel src block named "startup" which is
invoked by this code:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
  (defun esf/execute-startup-block ()
    (interactive)
    (org-babel-goto-named-src-block "startup")
    (org-babel-execute-src-block))
#+end_src

The only problem is that many of the variables I would like to customise
are global to the emacs instance and so cause problems if I am editing
more than one document which may have different requirements.  A greater
move towards buffer local variables would be of great benefit.

Or, knowing Emacs's capabilities, it is probably already possible to do
this and I just don't know how to do it... ;-)

> But, really, I can't imagine doing my scholarly writing outside of
> Emacs.

+∞

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.50.2, Org release_8.3.1-176-g45abec