Introduction

reStructuredText is a series of conventions that allows a toolset--docutils--to extract generic document structure from simple text files. For people who use Emacs, there is a package that adds some support for the conventions that reStructuredText specifies: rst.el.

This document describes the most important features that it provides, how to setup your emacs to use them and how to invoke them.

Basic Setup

The emacs support is completely provided by the rst.el emacs package. In order to use these features, you need to put the file in your emacs load-path, and to load it with:

(require 'rst)  ;; or (load "rst")

Additional configuration variables can be customized and can be found by browsing the source code for rst.el.

Then you will want to bind keys to the most common commands it provides. A standard text-mode hook function is maintained and provided by the package for this use, set it up like this:

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'rst-text-mode-bindings)

A prefix map is defined for all the rst.el commands. By default, it is bound to the mode-specific-map and p, e.g. C-c p ....

Section Decoration Adjustment

The rst package does not completely parse all the reStructuredText constructs, but it contains the ability to recognize the section decorations and to build the hierarchy of the document. What we call section decorations or adornments are the underlines or under- and overlines used to mark a section title.

There is a function that helps a great deal to maintain these decorations: rst-adjust (bound on C-c p a, C-c p = or C-= by default). This function is a Swiss army knife that can be invoked repeatedly and whose behaviour depends on context:

1. If there is an incomplete underline, e.g.:

   My Section Title
   ^^
   

   Invocation will complete the section title. You can simply enter a few characters of the title and invoke the function to complete it. It can also be used to adjust the length of the existing decoration when you need to edit the title.

2. If there is no section decoration, a decoration one level under the last encountered section level is added;

3. If there is already a section decoration, it is promoted to the next level. You can invoke it like this repeatedly to cycle the title through the hierarchy of existing decorations.

Invoking the function with a negative prefix argument, e.g. C-- C-=, will effectively reverse the direction of decoration cycling. To alternate between underline-only and over-and-under styles, you can use a regular prefix argument, e.g. C-u C-=. See the documentation of rst-adjust for more description of the prefix arguments to alter the behaviour of the function.

Viewing the Hierarchy of Section Decorations

You can visualize the hierarchy of the section decorations in the current buffer by invoking rst-display-decorations-hierarchy, bound on C-c p h. A temporary buffer will appear with fake section titles rendered in the style of the current document. This can be useful when editing other people's documents to find out which section decorations correspond to which levels.

Table of Contents

When you are editing long documents, it can be a bit difficult to orient yourself in the structure of your text. To that effect, a function is provided that quickly parses the document and presents a hierarchically indented table of contents of the document in a temporary buffer, in which you can navigate and press Return to go to a specific section.

Invoke this function (rst-toc) with C-c p t. It should present a temporary buffer that looks something like this:

Table of Contents:
Debugging Meta-Techniques
  Introduction
  Debugging Solution Patterns
    Recognize That a Bug Exists
    Subdivide and Isolate
    Identify and Verify Assumptions
    Use a Tool for Introspection
    Change one thing at a time
    Learn about the System
  Understanding a bug
  The Basic Steps in Debugging
  Attitude
    Bad Feelings
    Good Feelings
  References

When you select a section title, the temporary buffer disappears and you are left with the cursor positioned at the chosen section.

.. contents::
..
    1  Introduction
    2  Debugging Solution Patterns
      2.1  Recognize That a Bug Exists
      2.2  Subdivide and Isolate
      2.3  Identify and Verify Assumptions
      2.4  Use a Tool for Introspection
      2.5  Change one thing at a time
      2.6  Learn about the System
    3  Understanding a bug
    4  The Basic Steps in Debugging
    5  Attitude
      5.1  Bad Feelings
      5.2  Good Feelings
    6  References

(add-hook 'rst-adjust-hook 'rst-toc-insert-update)

Navigating Between the Section Titles

You can move the cursor between the different sections by using the rst-backward-section and rst-forward-section functions, by default bound to the C-c p p and C-c p n keys (also C-c C-p and C-c C-n).

Shifting Bullet List Levels

Due to the nature of reStructuredText, bullet lists are always indented by two characters (unless they are part of a blockquote), e.g.

- Fruits

  - Bananas
  - Apples
  - Oranges

- Veggies

  - Zucchini
  - Chick Peas

To this effect, when re-organizing bullet lists, it can be useful to shift regions of text by indents of two characters. You can use the C-c C-r and C-c C-l to shift the current region. These bindings are similar to the ones provided by python-mode for editing python code and behave similarly.

Major Mode for Editing reStructuredText Documents

There is a major mode available for editing and syntax highlighting reStructuredText constructs. This mode was written by Stefan Merten [1]. It mostly provides lazy syntax coloring for many of the constructs that reStructuredText prescribes.

To enable this mode, type M-x rst-mode or you can set up an auto-mode-alist to automatically turn it on whenever you visit reStructuredText documents:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.rst$" . rst-mode) )

If have local variables enabled (see enable-local-variables in the Emacs manual), you can also add the following at the top of your documents to trigger rst-mode:

.. -*- mode: rst -*-

Or add this at the end of your documents:

..
   Local Variables:
   mode: rst
   End:

By default, the font-lock colouring is performed lazily. If you don't like this, you can turn this off by setting the value of rst-mode-lazy. You can also change the various colours (see the source file for the whole list of customizable faces).

Converting Documents from Emacs

At the moment there is minimal support for calling the conversion tools from within Emacs. You can add a key binding like this to invoke it:

(local-set-key [(control c)(?9)] 'rst-compile)

This function basically creates a compilation command with the correct output name for the current buffer and then invokes Emacs' compile function. It also looks for the presence of a docutils.conf configuration file in the parent directories and adds it to the cmdline options. You can customize which tool is used to perform the conversion and some standard options to always be added as well.

Invocation uses the toolset indicated by rst-compile-primary-toolset (default is 'html). Invocation with a prefix argument uses rst-compile-secondary-toolset (default is 'latex).

Other / External Useful Emacs Settings

This section covers general emacs text-mode settings that are useful in the context of reStructuredText conventions. These are not provided by rst.el but you may find them useful specifically for reStructuredText documents.

- Bananas;
- One Apple a day keeps the doctor away, and eating more keeps the pirates at bay;
- Oranges;

- Bananas; One Apple a day keeps the doctor away, and eating more
- keeps the pirates at bay; Oranges;

- Bananas;
- One Apple a day keeps the doctor away, and eating more keeps
  the pirates at bay;
- Oranges;

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'rst-set-paragraph-separation)

Credits

• The automatic section adjustment and table of contents features were written by Martin Blais;
• rst-mode and its syntax highlighting was implemented by Stefan Merten;
• Various other functions were implemented by David Goodger.

Obsolete Files

On 2005-10-30, restructuredtext.el, rst-html.el and rst-mode.el were merged to form the new rst.el. You can consider the old files obsolete and remove them.

Future Work

Here are some features and ideas that will be worked on in the future, in those frenzied mornings of excitement over the virtues of the one-true-way kitchen sink of editors:

• It would be nice to differentiate between text files using reStructuredText and other general text files. If we had a function to automatically guess whether a .txt file is following the reStructuredText conventions, we could trigger rst-mode without having to hard-code this in every text file, nor forcing the user to add a local mode variable at the top of the file.

  We could perform this guessing by searching for a valid decoration at the top of the document or searching for reStructuredText directives further on.

• The suggested decorations when adjusting should not have to cycle below one below the last section decoration level preceding the cursor. We need to fix that.