Customising markdown-mode for Jekyll

This blog is written using Jekyll,1 a static site generator using markdown and Liquid templates. It’s very easy to use, can be hosted cheaply anywhere since everything is static, and Github will even compile it for you in addition to hosting.

Naturally, there is a markdown-mode for Emacs, and it’s quite good.

I did run into one issue though, due to interactions with Liquid syntax. By way of example, this is the syntax for a link in markdown:

[anchor text](http://www.google.com)

(Which renders as “anchor text"). Jekyll also provides a useful Liquid tag to link to previous posts, for example:

[older post]({% post_url 2014-05-20-parsing-ssh-agent-variables-in-emacs %})

This renders as “older post”.

The issue occurs in conjunction with paragraph filling. Both markdown and liquid require the examples above to be unbroken on a single line. Markdown-mode does the right thing and ensures the anchor text won’t be broken, but also correctly assumes that the URL won’t have spaces and thus will be safe. In conjunction with liquid though, it’s possible to have a situation like this, which will break Jekyll:

[older post]({% post_url
2014-05-20-parsing-ssh-agent-variables-in-emacs %})

Creating a fix requires some understanding of how filling commands work.2 Roughly, when a command like fill-paragraph is invoked Emacs starts at the beginning of a line, jumps forward to the fill-column, and then looks for white-space at which it can insert a newline. The wrinkle is it first checks if it is safe to break there, using a customisable variable called fill-nobreak-predicate. To get an example, we can look at how markdown-mode ensures it won’t break inside the square brackets of a link definition:

(defun markdown-nobreak-p ()
  "Return nil if it is acceptable to break the current line at the point."
  ;; inside in square brackets (e.g., link anchor text)
  (looking-back "\\[[^]]*"))

As you see, it just looks back to see if there’s an opening bracket (that isn’t followed by a closing one). We can use the same strategy to check if we’re in a liquid tag:

(defun mh/liquid-nobreak-p ()
  (looking-back "({{ "{%" }}[^%]*"))

Notice that we’re not worried about the anchor-text case here! That’s because fill-nobreak-predicate is a hook variable; that is, a list of functions, and in this case invoked until one of them returns non-nil, indicating that we shouldn’t break at this point.3 In other words, we want to add to this list, not replace or advise anything.

So now to incorporate our addition we just use the mode hook, and remember to also use add-hook with our new predicate:

(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (add-hook 'fill-nobreak-predicate 'mh/liquid-nobreak-p)))

And now we’re done, and can get back to blogging.


  1. Specifically, Jekyll Bootstrap, although I’d probably just use plain Jekyll if I was starting again. It’s a useful set of defaults though. ↩︎

  2. See fill-region-as-paragraph for the details; follow down through fill-move-to-break-point then fill-nobreak-p for the invocation of fill-nobreak-predicate↩︎

  3. See run-hook-with-args-until-success↩︎


comments powered by Disqus