Modern Org Style

This package implements a “modern” style for your Org buffers using font locking and text properties. The package styles headlines, keywords, tables and source blocks. The styling is configurable, you can enable, disable or modify the style of each syntax element individually via the org-modern customization group.

The screenshots shows example.org with org-modern turned on and off. The elegant theme featured in the screenshot is modus-operandi.

This package is still early in its development, so expect bugs and issues in particular due to unfortunate interactions of the variable-pitch and fixed-pitch fonts. Bug reports, improvement or style proposals are welcome! Maybe some more Org elements deserve styling or alternative stylings should be offered?

The tag style of org-modern is a poor Emacsien’s ripoff from Nicholas Rougier’s beautiful svg-tag-mode. In contrast to svg-tag-mode, this package avoids images and uses cheap and fast Emacs box text properties. By only styling the text via text properties, the styled text, e.g., dates or tags stay editable and are easy to interact with.

On the downside, this restricts our flexibility and may lead to font-dependent issues. We do our best, but for example there is no way we can round corners. Of course a combination of org-modern with svg-tag-mode is possible. You can use SVG tags and use the table and block styling from org-modern. If you are interested in further tweaks, Emacs comes with the builtin prettify-symbols-mode which can be used for individual styling of custom keywords.

Another popular alternative is org-superstar, which has a more restricted feature set and mainly adjusts headlines and lists. org-superstar relies on character composition, while org-modern uses text properties, which are considered more future-proof.

The package is not yet available in a package repository, so it must be installed manually from this repository via package-install-file. Then org-modern can be enabled manually by invoking M-x org-modern-mode. In order to enable org-modern for all your Org buffers, add org-modern-mode to the Org mode hook list.

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'org-modern-mode)

Note that org-modern-mode tries to adjust the tag label display based on the value of line-spacing. This looks best if line-spacing has a value between 0.1 and 0.4 in the Org buffer.