Bug: org-edit-special indents inline latex [9.5 (nil @ /home/david/.emacs.d/.local/straight/build-27.2/org-mode/)]

[Dávid Jakab]

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------------------------------------------------------------------------


Emacs  : GNU Emacs 27.2 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 
3.24.27, cairo version 1.17.4)
 of 2021-03-26
Package: Org mode version 9.5 (nil @ 
/home/david/.emacs.d/.local/straight/build-27.2/org-mode/)


When using org-edit-special to edit inline latex, i.e., equations 
between \( and \), in an org-mode buffer, a number of
spaces may get inserted before \( after the latex editing minibuffer is 
closed. It seems like the number of extra spaces
defaults to the indentation of the line in which the inline math is 
located. This behavior makes complete sense for code
blocks and latex environments, but I can't see a use case in which it 
should be applied to inline math. It looks like
the option to edit inline math with org-edit-special was added only 
recently, so this could be a bug that noone
noticed yet.
I looked at the code that does things and it seems the variable that 
controls the indentation of the parts edited in the
minibuffer is a buffer-local variable org-src--preserve-indentation. 
Setting a default value to it has no effect because
it gets overwritten internally in the function org-src--edit-element. 
There is a variable with a similar name
org-src-preserve-indentation that is supposed to set by the user, but it 
has no effect specifically in the case of latex
fragments because org-src--edit-element contains the code:
  (let* (...
         (preserve-ind
          (and (memq type '(example-block src-block))
           (or (org-element-property :preserve-indent datum)
               org-src-preserve-indentation))) ...)
 ...

(setq org-src--preserve-indentation preserve-ind)

So the user is only allowed to turn off org-edit-special messing with 
the indentation if he is an an example-block or
src-block. I hacked in a fix modifying org-src--edit-element by 
replacing (memq type '(example-block src-block)) with
(memq type '(example-block src-block latex-fragment)) and setting 
org-src-preserve-indentation. This seems to have
solved the issue, but I believe the function shouldn't even be trying to 
indent inline math in the first place.