This package implements a “modern” style for your Org buffers using font locking
and text properties. The package styles headlines, keywords, tables and source
blocks. The styling is configurable, you can enable, disable or modify the style
of each syntax element individually via the org-modern customization group.
The screenshots shows example.org with org-modern turned on and off. The
elegant theme featured in the screenshot is modus-operandi.
This package is still early in its development, so expect bugs and issues in
particular due to unfortunate interactions of the variable-pitch and fixed-pitch
fonts. You should ensure that your fonts combine harmonically and have
approximately the same height. Note that org-indent-mode interferes with some of
the style elements applied by org-modern-mode, e.g., the block brackets in the
fringe. Bug reports, improvement or style proposals are welcome! Maybe some more
Org elements deserve styling or alternative stylings should be offered?
The tag style of org-modern is a poor Emacsien’s ripoff from Nicholas Rougier’s
beautiful svg-tag-mode. In contrast to svg-tag-mode, this package avoids images
and uses cheap and fast Emacs box text properties. By only styling the text via
text properties, the styled text, e.g., dates or tags stay editable and are easy
to interact with.
On the downside, this restricts our flexibility and may lead to font-dependent
issues. We do our best, but for example there is no way we can round corners. Of
course a combination of org-modern with svg-tag-mode is possible. You can use
SVG tags and use the table and block styling from org-modern. If you are
interested in further tweaks, Emacs comes with the builtin prettify-symbols-mode
which can be used for individual styling of custom keywords.
Another popular alternative is org-superstar, which has a more restricted
feature set and mainly adjusts headlines and lists. org-superstar relies on
character composition, while org-modern uses text properties, which are
considered more future-proof.
The package is available on MELPA. You can install it with package-install if
you have the MELPA package repository activated. Then org-modern can be enabled
manually in an Org buffer by invoking M-x org-modern-mode. In order to enable
org-modern for all your Org buffers, add org-modern-mode to the Org mode hooks.
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'org-modern-mode)Note that org-modern-mode tries to adjust the tag label display based on the
value of line-spacing. This looks best if line-spacing has a value between 0.1
and 0.4 in the Org buffer.