Internationalization in Org-mode with Doom Emacs

Not so long ago, I discovered digraphs and since I use aerc as my email client, I immediately found it to be a blessing, because I write in many languages on a daily basis (mainly French, English and Spanish), and changing keyboard layouts is very painful for the brain, and everybody knows that the QWERTY layout is superior for Vim, even Theprimeagen (yes this was an actual talk at the Vimconf 2020) says so, but I absolutely hate the international US Layout.

That said, I obviously directly wanted to include this in my org-mode workflow with Doom Emacs, don’t ask me why I use both (Neo)vim and (Doom)emacs, it turns out that choosing an editor is a more complex task than what it seems in the first place… but I digress. What a surprise when I tried
<C-K> and it jumped to the parent tree instead of showing the “right” behaviour, a quick look at the evil’s symbols definition shows that it’s obviously not the culprit, moreover the feature seems to work everywhere except in org-mode… Hmmmh doom-emacs what are you up to? Seems like the “problem” is here. I’m not remotely familiar with Elisp, but it looks like a remaping of the keyboard shortcut of interest in org-mode sigh.

Anyway, Emacs has a built-in way to insert digraphs, while it’s way less efficient than what I am accustomed to, you have to type C-x 8 then the combination of symbols to insert your accented character (‘e = é for example). If you want to learn more have a look at this article about Diacritics in Emacs.

Written on September 22, 2020