Making markdown a bit nicer in Emacs

Over the past couple of weekends I've been working on converting most of the pages you see here to markdown. At least, I now edit them as markdown. You still see them as HTML... I just now have a nicer format to work in. I've been avoiding making my website more complex for a long time, but eventually the process of manually copying certain common things into each new post or page was getting tiring. At some point, once the process is more fleshed out, I'll write about how I'm building the site based on all these markdown files. This post, however, is a bit more focused on making the editing of markdown files nicer in Emacs.

Configuration

First of all, you need to have markdown-mode installed. Unfortunatly, it doesn't come with Emacs by default 🥲. Once you have it though, here's two things to configure that make the reading of markdown files so much cleaner.

(require 'markdown-mode)
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (setq markdown-fontify-code-blocks-natively t
                  markdown-hide-urls t)))

Before

After

Hiding the links is so much nicer in my opinion. It lets you fill-paragraph and still have the result easily readable. Highlighting code within the document is a nice bonus as well.