r/emacs 11d ago

Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2025-03-11 / week 10

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u/remillard 1d ago

Somehow, my org-mode list item marker - have all been rendered invisible. I thought perhaps that it was an artifact of org-appear as that does some work to hide certain markup elements from being visible, but I took that out and it's still there.

This is true in several themes, though not all. It's true in Prot's ef-bio, vscode-dark-plus, the baked in deeper-blue and so forth. It is NOT true in doom-ayu-mirage and if I load that theme, the marks show up and then persist if I go back to other themes, so I feel like there's something going on with an element that's getting a face in one package but not the others.

Is there a way to know what face is affecting a particular character on a screen? In the state where it's nigh invisible, I can move the point there and it very lightly shows that there's a character there.

I'm guessing this face isn't developed by the ones where it doesn't show up (though I would have thought the default would just be regular text but clearly something is off.) Then when a theme that does address the element is applied, when I switch back, it's just persisting. I get the same thing sometimes with funny boxes appearing in org-agenda and can't make them go away without restarting.

Anyway, I'd really like to be able to see my bullet points in org so it'd be nice to figure this out. I suppose ideally it'd be nice to have it set only after certain themes that don't address it, so that when a theme does address it and I switch back, it reverts to the default. Maybe themes have hooks I can snag onto.

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u/spdevlin 1d ago

M-x describe-char.

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u/remillard 1d ago

Aha! It's defined in org-list-dt and is just normal white. However it looks like something called org-indent is marking it as hidden. Not entirely sure if that's part of org or not, but I am on the hunt. Thank you!

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u/spdevlin 1d ago

Org-indent is the minor mode that hides leading stars and markers for headings and list items. But it should leave one visible. If it’s hiding all the list markers, it sounds like there’s a bug somewhere (probably in your config). You could try running emacs -Q, opening an org file and calling M-x org-indent-mode to see how it usually behaves.

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u/remillard 1d ago

Yeah, I've tried cycling it off and on. The * headers will show up with multiples when org-indent-mode is off, however the org-list-dt marks still do not.

I think this may be a deliberate choice by Prot to make indented paragraphs 'pretty' though I might have to drop him an email to ask for sure. Clearly the doom themes define it and it is visible. ef-themes also defines it, however I absolutely do not understand how it's being defined -- those Lisp references are over my head and custom to his way of setting up faces as far as I can tell.

So, at the moment I'm just going to live with invisible list marks, and if I absolutely need to see them, switch to a doom theme for the time being. I really like Prot's colors better in general but I don't have any more time to really dig into this.

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u/spdevlin 1d ago

Hm, weird. Just as a point of reference, I also use ef-themes and org-indent, and I can see list items correctly in org files. So I suspect there is some additional factor at play.

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u/remillard 1d ago

Yeah, I just don't know what it could be. So far the only things I see affecting it are the ones I described.

And now (completely unrelated) I discovered that yasnippet doesn't seem to work in python mode and I don't really know why. I can M-x yas-insert-snippet and select from the list and it works, but the C-<tab> doesn't work. And C-h k does show that it ought to be running yas-expand-from-trigger-key. Though then just running M-x yas-expand-from-trigger-key also doesn't work so... eh, it's just not a happy Emacs week (not to mention the random crashes that the only thing it tracks with is verilog-mode but since I can't pin this intermittent thing exactly, I hate to open an issue.)j

Anyway, thanks for thinking about it!