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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

What's the use case for escaping its syntax? At top level it's just an arbitrarily nested list.

So you can type *word* without it becoming bold? So an article can contain: "The logs come to about ~300 lines once you start the server with ~systemctl start fnord~"

The `code` equivalent in Org is ~code~. How do you type that without the Org highlighting removing the ~ from "~300 lines", thinking that the code snippet begins there? This is an example I got from grepping my org files for U+200B.

I wasn't sure how to do this, so I looked into it:

If you (setq org-pretty-entities t) below will render correctly in org buffers, and exports correctly too.

The logs come to about \tilde{}300 lines once you start the server with ~systemctl start fnord~

Here's a star: \ast

I see. Just gave it a try and backslash works as escape. Though also I'm probably unlikely to experience such issues myself as my Emacs theme shows formatting characters even after applying the formatting.

The following:

  \~300 lines

Still exports as <p>\~300 lines</p> (in case of an HTML export). In fact you could "escape it" with any character, the backslash isn't doing anything special, the formatting just doesn't trigger if there's no white space on one side. When I use Org I also do not have auto-formatting, as you do, but the highlighting would still be wrong. And it'd be masochistic to put up with that unless you've invested a lot into Org for other reasons.

Sounds to me like it's a shortcoming of the exporter then, to not remove the escape characters as appropriate. Though one would think others would've run into this issue and fixed it. Or perhaps you're missing some other prevalent alternative?

The highlighting corrects for me once I "escape" the "~300".

You didn't understand me. The highlighting also disappears if you "escape" with %

  %~300

Or the character A:

  A~300

Isn't the aim to have the highlighting only apply to `~systemctl start fnord~`, and not have whatever you used to escape the "~300" appear in an export? Highlighting and exporting are 2 pretty distinct functions.

I use org a lot, in fact, it's my daily driver. I also have to deal with MySQL, and, if using the vertical output (what you get if you finish a query with '\G' instead of ';' it makes pasting into an org file a pain.

Sure, not a big pain, I just wrapped it in a function paste-from-mysql that appends the whitespace, but then I need to take out the whitespace of I want to paste that somewhere else. It would be nice to have org support some sort of 'do not interpret what comes next' block markers. I guess someone with enough time and skills could make this change but, alas, that's not me.

Have you tried literal examples?

https://orgmode.org/manual/Literal-Examples.html

Thanks! I had actually seen that, but didn't realize that org does remove the leading comma when you extract a block to paste it somewhere else, which is great, because it means I need one less function.

Now I just need to keep my paste function, but have it add a leading comma instead of a space, and I need to use example instead of src (not a problem for this use case since, even though I normally paste them into sql src blocks, the syntax highlighting isn't that useful.

You gave me a nice little task for a rainy day, thanks :)

In an Org document that contains Org examples (e.g. if this article had been written in Org), even Emacs gets confused about rendering it. So you might find that sections in example text are evaluated as being part of top-level sections and collapsing is wonky, etc.

I run into this a lot with gptel. I use a main Org file for all my daily notes, and since gptel streams LLM output as Org (which is good), it conflicts with my main file. I have a post-processing function that converts headings into `#` to avoid this, but it's a hack I'd rather not do.

Karl Voit writes their articles in Org though, it even says so on the footer.

Hmm I'm still not seeing the issue. Why aren't the examples just lists under say an examples header? Or the LLM output? Maybe gptel is expecting output to be in a fresh file or at the top level? It should be a trivial fix to intent a level before inserting.

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