Michał Sapka's website

Literate configuration of Elfeed

Recently I’ve been toying with a literate configuration¹ of Emacs. My init.el took a straightforward form:

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(org-babel-load-file "~/.emacs.d/config.org")

And all of my configuration lives in an org-file. This alone gives me very little benefit for now, but in the future, it will make it easier to have it as a dedicated page on this site.

However, one thing completely surprised me: the elfeed configuration. Until now, I used the standard way of configuring feeds with Elisp. It works, but what it is not is readable. A list of:

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("https://gideonwolfe.com/index.xml" blog imporant)
("https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml" blog important)
("https://protesilaos.com/master.xml" emacs)

is far from being manageable and requires constant manual labor.

Elfeed-org

One of the packages expanding capabilities of elfeed is elfeed-org². It allows configuring the list of feeds with a standard org tree. Since my config is now also an org file, nothing stops me from adding the list as an org-tree inside my config org-file! I set it up via:

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*** elfeed-org

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
  (use-package elfeed-org
  :ensure t
  :config
  (setq rmh-elfeed-org-files (list "~/.emacs.d/config.org"))
  (elfeed-org))
#+END_SRC

Therefore, I am now pointing at the same file to become the data source for elfeed-org as the rest of my config. Just a few lines down, I start to define my list of subscriptions:

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*** Feeds :elfeed:

**** Blogs

***** https://gideonwolfe.com/index.xml      :important:
***** https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml.    :important:

**** Emacs

***** https://protesilaos.com/master.xml     :important:

Much more readable! Elfeed-org will ignore the entire outer tree and extract the feeds from leaves under the :elfeed: tag.