Re: How to represent Emacs keystrokes in Org?

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl>]

Hi there,

it seems that reviving old threads is my new hobby;-).

On 2014-11-29, at 22:58, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> wrote:

> On 2014-11-29, at 22:53, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> On 2014-11-24, at 19:38, Rasmus wrote:
>>
>>> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I'm writing (in Org) a text on Emacs usage.  How to
>>>> correctly/canonically represent keystrokes, like "C-x RET f"?
>>>> Currently, I use =C-x RET f=; are there any alternatives?
>>>
>>> That's what I'd do.  Or ~C-x RET f~.  You could also use a macro, if you
>>> want it to me be more semantic (I hope I use this word correctly).

This might seem a good idea, but how do I do it?  (See below for
a concrete problem statement.)

>> Houston, we've got a problem.  What about =M-,=?  Somehow it seems not
>> to be interpreted in the right way: it does not get fontified correctly,
>> nor does export in the right way.  What can I do about it?  I found
>> about org-emphasis-regexp-components, is it the only way?  Also, how do
>> I reload Org without restarting Emacs?  (I am an Emacs geek and I try to
>> beat my record of emacs-uptime, you know. ;-) )
>
> Wow, I got an idea, and it worked.  Here's an excerpt from `C-u C-x ='
> at my solution;-):
>
>              position: 11859 of 16051 (74%), column: 253
>             character: ‍ (displayed as ‍) (codepoint 8205, #o20015, #x200d)
>     preferred charset: unicode (Unicode (ISO10646))
> code point in charset: 0x200D
>                syntax: . 	which means: punctuation
>              to input: type "C-x 8 RET HEX-CODEPOINT" or "C-x 8 RET NAME"
>           buffer code: #xE2 #x80 #x8D
>             file code: #xE2 #x80 #x8D (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix)
>               display: by this font (glyph code)
>     xft:-unknown-Phetsarath OT-normal-normal-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-0-iso10646-1 (#x120)
>
> Character code properties: customize what to show
>   name: ZERO WIDTH JOINER
>
> A bit ugly trick, but works.  What are the opinions?

After a while I have to say that my opinion is strongly negative: this
breaks LaTeX export.  (LaTeX doesn’t like some unicode characters, it
turns out.)  Also, this was really an ugly hack...

So, here is my problem: how to represent a key like M-, or
e.g. a sequence \, (important in regexps) as “code” or “verbatim stuff”
in org-mode?  Neither =\,= nor ~\,~ work, of course.  Also, I’d like
this to be backend-agnostic, so \texttt{M-,} doesn’t really work.

What is the rationale behind forbidding the comma as the “border”
character in org-emphasis-regexp-components?  Should I change this
variable in my setup or is there a more general way to convince Org that
I really want verbatim/code snippets like =\,=?

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University