January 2022

Nine months ago, Ihor started working on the org-element cache. The cache has existed for a while now, but it used to be too buggy to be useful.

This is no longer the case! We’re finally confident enough to flip org-element-use-cache’s default from nil to t. I mentioned some of the improvements in November, however Ihor has continued to make strides with the cache.

Getting the cache right is tough though, and so while the situation is much improved there are still lingering bugs which need to be chased down. If you only take one thing away from the post, I’d like it to be this:

Warning (org-element-cache): org-element--cache: Unregistered buffer modifications detected. Resetting.
If this warning appears regularly, please report the warning text to Org mode mailing list (M-x org-submit-bug-report).
The buffer is: config.org
 Current command: (some-buggy-command)
 Chars modified: 483
 Buffer modified: 330957
 Backtrace:
...some possibly long backtrace...

As of October 2021, “bulk” heading promotion/demotion operations are now faster thanks to the cache, and there have now been further improvements relating to headings. It used to be the case that every time heading properties changed the entire heading (and contents) were re-parsed. Now, cache heuristics prevent the content from being entirely re-parsed (see org-element--cache-avoid-synchronous-headline-re-parsing for a bit more information). This improvement is particularly noticeable when refiling and archiving headings.

In October, Ihor started work on org-persist.el — a way to persist data across Emacs sessions. You may wonder what sort of data is being persisted. Well, initially org-persist was written to record variable values associated with particular files or buffers — such as the org-element cache. This allows org-mode to load the cache for an Org file and avoid re-parsing much of the content.

Over the past month, Ihor has doubled the total number of commits applied to org-persist.el and now more kinds of data can be persisted, such as remote files (via. tramp) and online resources. This opens up a lot of new possibilities, and we can begin to see what this will allow for in the next highlight.

Ever linked to an online image like https://orgmode.org/resources/img/org-mode-unicorn.svg in an Org document, seen it look nice in the HTML export and then be disappointed to just see a link in LaTeX? Well I have. Thankfully this is no longer the case though, thanks to a helper function org-export-link-localise that’s just been added to ox.el.

Using org-persist.el this acquires a local copy of the remote resource and substitutes it in for the remote link. This is currently utilised in ox-latex.el to provide support for not just HTTPS links but also tramp files!

While this is currently only implemented for ox-latex, this can be applied generally, and so there’s a good chance you’ll hear more about this in the future.

There are also thoughts of moving this to the links file (ol.el) which would make this functionality more broadly accessible (e.g. using cached/local versions of a resource in other places, and defining custom downloaders for custom link types).

• Produce less native-comp warnings Ihor Radchenko
• Add a header to the clock report table Samim Pezeshki
• More verbose test failure summary Max Nikulin
• Parallelise makeing the docs Marco Wahl
• More org-element tests Ihor Radchenko

• Fix formatting in elisp-link prompt TEC
• Correct some checkdoc and compiler warnings Ihor Radchenko
• Correct signature for org-element-at-point Mark A. Hershberger
• Fix the LaTeX macron accent in org-entities TEC
• Ignore narrowing when tangling a file Nicolas Goaziou