I enjoy trying to find tiny cosmetic changes to my environment that completely transform how a frequent activity feels: like moving around furniture, or changing my default Emacs font (❤︎ Source Code Pro). Emacs and org-mode provide plenty of opportunities for little tweaks. I’m sharing one of my favorites for this week’s mini-post: replacing plain list’s hyphen bullets with unicode triangular bullets.

(I first found this idea (here))

When taking notes or exploring a problem, I end up with a lot of plain lists in org-mode:

Tips
 - do this
 - and that
   - but by *that*, I don't mean _that_
 - but maybe do it anyway

The dashes are fine, but a bit dull. After adding the following code to my init.el

(font-lock-add-keywords 'org-mode
                        '(("^ +\\([-*]\\) "
                           0 (prog1 () (compose-region (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1) "‣")))))

my list becomes

Tips
‣ do this
‣ and that
  ‣ but by *that*, I don't mean _that_
‣ but maybe do it anyway

(to be honest, I like it more in the Source Code Pro font I use. The triangles are more equilateral.)

I added another one that changes -> into →.

(font-lock-add-keywords 'org-mode
                        '(("^ +\\([-*]\\) "
                           0 (prog1 () (compose-region (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1) "‣")))
                          ("\\(->\\)"
                           0 (prog1 () (compose-region (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1) "→")))))

I like how org-mode’s formatting magically appears on top of my typing. With the above, and font-lock-add-keywords in general, I can add more magic to org-mode and Emacs.

See also