Re: [O] add entries to *emphasis-alist

[Nick Dokos]

Sebastien Vauban <address@hidden> wrote:

> You have to make that customization *before* loading Org in your .emacs file.
> Weird, never really understood why, but that's like that.
> 

The point is that the value of org-emphasis-alist (as well as the value
of org-emphasis-regexp-components) is used in order to calculate the
value of org-emph-re by calling the function org-set-emph-re afterwards:
it's org-emph-re that's used for the all the gory calculations, not
org-emphasis-alist, which just provides a nicer interface.

So if you arrange to call the org-set-emph-re function afterwards, you
can change org-emphasis-alist at any time. Customize makes it easy, in
that it does that automatically (see the :set property
of org-emphasis-alist).

If you do the setq before loading org, then what happens is that when the
defcustom is encountered, the value of the :set property (a function) is
called: the modified value of org-emphasis-alist is then used to calculate
org-emph-re, instead of the original default. If you do it after, none
of that happens and it's as if you never changed it.

Nick

PS BTW, the docstring for the variable says: "Use customize to modify
   this, or restart Emacs after changing it" but I'm not sure that's
   correct: if you change the variable in one session, the value is not
   going to be propagated to the next session, unless you use customize
   or put the setq in .emacs. In the latter case, it's not going to work
   unless you do it the way Seb describes: set it before loading Org.
   So restarting emacs is *not* enough. Am I missing something?