nix-org-babel

This is an implementation of org-babel-tangle in Nix. Given an Org string, it extracts the contents of source blocks in a particular language.

Rationale

talyz/fromElisp provides support for Org, and it is also part of emacs-overlay, which apparently is used by many people for their own configs. However, I wanted to experiment with more advanced features such as excluding archived entries, and I wasn’t sure if I could mix that with their code base. I needed the feature in my own project, and I wanted to put it under my control, so I wrote it from scratch.

Usage

Import the flake.

Extracting source blocks from an Org file/string

tangleOrgBabel function

This function takes an Org string and returns its source blocks.

Example:

let
  tangle = lib.tangleOrgBabel {
    languages = [ "emacs-lisp" ];
  };
in
# Return a string
tangle (builtins.readFile ./config.org)

Arguments:

1. An attribute set of options.
2. An Org input string.

tangleOrgBabelFile function

Similar to tangleOrgBabel, but this function takes a file as an argument and writes the output to a file.

Example:

# Write to a file
let
  pkgs = import nixpkgs {
    inherit system;
    overlays = [
      org-babel.overlays.default
    ];
  };
in
pkgs.tangleOrgBabelFile "init.el" ./config.org {
  languages = [ "emacs-lisp" ];
}

Note that this function is provided in the overlay of the flake.

Arguments:

1. A string for the derivation name.
2. An input file path.
3. An attribute set of options.

Options

Languages

Example:

{
  languages = [ "emacs-lisp" "elisp" ];
}

Default: [ "emacs-lisp" "elisp" ]

Filtering subtrees

You can transform the input by specifying processLines option. It must be a function that takes a list of strings and returns a list of strings.

This library also contains excludeHeadlines function which can be used to exclude subtrees according to a predicate on the headline text, so you can use it in the option.

Example:

{
  # Exclude archived subtrees
  processLines = excludeHeadlines (matchOrgTag "ARCHIVE");
}

You can use the following predicates from this library:

tag

Returns true if the headline matches a tag given as the argument. The argument must be a string.

headlineText

Returns true if the headline matches the text given as the argument. The argument must be a string.