I am just getting settled in with Org Mode for Emacs and am constantly amazed at its versatility and wide feature set. One problem has been bugging me in Org for quite a while now, though: electric-indent-mode, which I use for auto-indentation when programming, gets in the way by auto-indenting Org headers.
My annoyance reached a critical point earlier this morning, and so I set off in search of a fix to disable electric indenting “mode-locally” — that is, disable the mode in Org buffers but not in buffers of any other mode. The catch with electric-indent-mode is that it is a global minor mode — something that is enabled once and assumed to be necessary for all buffers.
After a bit of searching, however, I was glad to find that the author of the mode had left in a backdoor for customizing its functionality. Meet electric-indent-functions:
Special hook run to decide whether to auto-indent. Each function is called with one argument (the inserted char), with point right after that char, and it should return t to cause indentation, `no-indent’ to prevent indentation or nil to let other functions decide.
Perfect! The default value for this variable (as of Emacs 24.0.92.1) is nil, so I made the choice to recklessly overwrite this variable at a buffer-local level.
Enough technoblabber; here’s the fix. Add the following code into an Emacs Lisp file that gets run on initialization:
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(set (make-local-variable 'electric-indent-functions)
(list (lambda (arg) 'no-indent)))))You can find the latest version of my Org mode config in my dotfiles repo.