Re: customizing Org for legibility

[Diego Zamboni <diego@zzamboni.org>]

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Hi Samuel,


> i get the sense spacemacs has brought a lot of new users to emacs.  i
> don't use it but i have comments on your interesting and welcome
> beauty tips.
>

This is definitely the case. I also don't use Spacemacs, but know a few
people who got started thanks to it. I even have a friend who was a
devoted vim user, and now swears by Spacemacs, particularly thanks to
org-mode and magit :)

this is really impressive.  does it have a fill column?
>

Yes, there is (I don't use it):
https://github.com/joostkremers/visual-fill-column

i would be over the moon if you could make headers in the agenda
> variable pitch.  not only would it look better and be consistent with
> the outline, but it would conserve space.
>

I think you can configure most faces as you wish. For this, I have found
the key "C-u C-x =" (which run what-cursor-position with the DETAILED
argument enabled) very useful - among other things, it shows the face which
is applied at the point under the cursor. Based on that, you can know which
face you need to customize. For example, when running it on an agenda
header line, I see the following:

There are text properties here:
  day                  737456
  face                 org-agenda-date-today

By customizing this face to inherit from "variable-pitch", I was able to
make those lines display in variable pitch font.

also, i would remove the second column, which seems not to do anything.
>
> also, i removed colons from some columns in the agenda and think it
> looks better.  also i aligned all items.  also, i made bare active
> tses use a leader.  also i made everything more compact except
> categories which i widened.  also, i removed [xd.] in leaders.
>

I would be interested to learn how to make these customizations. I have
only recently been getting into agenda mode, so I have not customized much
yet,

curious what the brackets mean in
>    ("PROPOSAL"     . "orange")
>    ("[PROPOSAL]"   . "orange")
>

Nothing special - only that I sometimes use TAG in my headers, and others I
use [TAG], depending on how I think it looks better at the time :) This way
it gets colorized correctly no matter what.

what does reformatting a buffer change?
>

I guess you are referring to the zz/org-reformat-buffer in my config? I got
this from the mailing list, although I can't remember who posted it (sorry
to the author! there goes my intention to always attribute things). It
basically redoes all the spacing and indentation in the buffer. I run it
every once in a while to uniformize things.

could tags be fixed to stay at a column by counting pixels?
>

I have not found a way to make that happen. The misalignment was bothering
me, so in the end this is what I do:

- In =variable-pitch= mode, the default right-alignment for headline tags
doesn't work, and results in the tags being misaligned (as it uses
character positions to do the alignment). This setting positions the tags
right after the last character of the headline, so at least they are more
consistent.

  #+begin_src emacs-lisp :tangle no :noweb-ref org-mode-custom-vars
    (org-tags-column 0)
  #+end_src


> thank you for the tips.
>

Glad you found them useful!

Cheers,
--Diego

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