Pretty fontification of source code blocks

This article is some "theming guide" about customizing the look and feel of an Org-Babel buffer inside Emacs. We'll show you how you can improve the appearance of source code blocks.

Screenshot for the Leuven theme (light theme, i.e. with a white background):

To configure "native fontification" (as in the above screenshot), set the following in your .emacs file:

;; fontify code in code blocks
(setq org-src-fontify-natively t)

• To get the above full contributed theme, please visit Installing Org Color themes and copy the file color-theme-leuven.el in your load-path.
• If you want to keep your existing Emacs color theme, and you only want to customize the "delimiter lines" of the code blocks, either:
  • Add the following lines to your current color theme:

    (org-block-begin-line
     ((t (:underline "#A7A6AA" :foreground "#008ED1" :background "#EAEAFF"))))
    (org-block-background
     ((t (:background "#FFFFEA"))))
    (org-block-end-line
     ((t (:overline "#A7A6AA" :foreground "#008ED1" :background "#EAEAFF"))))
    

  • Define these faces, in your .emacs file, before requiring Org (if you don't have your own color theme):

    (defface org-block-begin-line
      '((t (:underline "#A7A6AA" :foreground "#008ED1" :background "#EAEAFF")))
      "Face used for the line delimiting the begin of source blocks.")
    
    (defface org-block-background
      '((t (:background "#FFFFEA")))
      "Face used for the source block background.")
    
    (defface org-block-end-line
      '((t (:overline "#A7A6AA" :foreground "#008ED1" :background "#EAEAFF")))
      "Face used for the line delimiting the end of source blocks.")
    

When we will have some spare time, our intention is to get the reserved keywords of Org-Babel (such as :var and :exports) somehow highlighted. Stay tuned – or give some help!