Basic Emacs Muse Configuration

Looking back over my old posts, I found I didn’t cover basic muse setup at the time when I did my original muse series.

part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4

As I’ve mentioned previously, I generate the html (including the funky syntax highlighting) for my posts and squidoo lenses using muse with htmlize.

You can download muse here and if you are using emacs23 then you need the patched version of htmlize, available here.

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The first thing I do with most third party modules, is I add the require lines and the paths I need.

(load "my-vars.el")

(defconst *elisp-muse* (concat *elisp-3rd* "/muse-3.12/lisp"))

(add-to-list 'load-path *elisp-muse*)

(require 'htmlize)

(require 'muse-mode)
(require 'muse-publish)
(require 'muse-html)

my-var.el contains constants pointing to the top-level directories (I still haven’t got around to putting everything under emacs.d)

(defconst *elisp-dir* (expand-file-name "~/emacs-files"))
(defconst *elisp-3rd* (concat *elisp-dir* "/third-party"))

(provide 'my-vars)

I use a couple of minor modes together with muse which are added to muse-mode-hook. (Note, I’m still using longlines-mode as at work I’m unable to use emacs23 where visual-line-mode was introduced)

(defun muse-minor-modes ()
  (longlines-mode 1)
  (flyspell-mode 1)
  (font-lock-mode 0))

(add-hook 'muse-mode-hook 'muse-minor-modes)

And I like publishing to be activated by a single key.

(defun my-muse-publish ()
  (interactive)
  (muse-publish-file (buffer-file-name) "html"))

(define-key muse-mode-map [f7] 'my-muse-publish)