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Completion of hugo links in Emacs

·3 mins· Source
Emacs Hugo
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When writing an article in hugo I want to link to previous articles I published. In markdown I can use:

[Hugo link completions](dev/hugo-links)

Which will resolve to either:

  • content/dev/hugo-links.md or
  • content/dev/hugo-links/index.md.

As my site grew, so did I grow tired of trying to remember or copy-pasting these links. Completion to the rescue. Fully integrated in your favorite editor: Emacs.

Hugo provides the completion candidates; the content files it knows about:

#! /bin/sh

# matches NAME/index.md files, excludes _index.md and NAME.md
cd $WEB_HOME
hugo list all --noBuildLock | tail -n+2 | cut -d, -f1 | grep -v "_index" | cut -d/ -f2- |
  rev | cut -d/ -f2- | rev
Multi-language script

This script supports both English (.md) and German (.de.md) content files.

#! /bin/sh

lang=$1

list_files() {
  # excludes _index.md and NAME.md files
  cd $WEB_HOME
  case $lang in
    en)
      hugo list all --noBuildLock | tail -n+2 | cut -d, -f1 | grep -v "_index" | cut -d/ -f2- |
        grep -v ".de.md" | rev | cut -d/ -f2- | rev
      break;;
    de)
      hugo list all --noBuildLock | tail -n+2 | cut -d, -f1 | grep -v "_index" | cut -d/ -f2- |
        grep ".de.md" | rev | cut -d/ -f2- | rev
      break;;
    -|both)
      hugo list all --noBuildLock | tail -n+2 | cut -d, -f1 | grep -v "_index" | cut -d/ -f2- |
        rev | cut -d/ -f2- | rev | sort | uniq
      break;;
    *)
      echo "Invalid language"
      exit 1
  esac
}

You can find an expanded version of the script in my dotfiles.

The elisp function for this completion can be as simple as:

(defun hugo-md-web-complete ()
  "Completion for links to my website."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((articles (shell-command-to-string "pick-hugo-article")) ; the shell script from above
         (link (completing-read "link: " (split-string articles "\n" t) nil t)))
    (insert (format "[%s](%s)" (read-string "link text: ") link))))
;;   inserts: [link text](link)

Now, I use multiple languages and ox-hugo (hugo org-mode content files), so my solution needed to account for that.

Local hugo links are not very useful outside of the hugo directory. Instead the script should output a complete website link: “https://jneidel.com/…”

(defun jn/org-web-complete (lang)
  "Completion for links to my website."
  (let* ((articles (shell-command-to-string (format "pick-hugo-article %s" lang)))
         (link (completing-read "web: " (split-string articles "\n" t) nil t))
         (current-file (when buffer-file-name
                         (file-truename buffer-file-name)))
         (is-editing-website (and
                              current-file
                              (string-prefix-p (substitute-in-file-name "$WEB_HOME") current-file)))
         (website-root (if (equal lang "de")
                           "https://jneidel.de/"
                         "https://jneidel.com/")))
    (if is-editing-website
        link
      (concat website-root link))))

(defun jn/org-web-de-complete ()
  (jn/org-web-complete "de"))
(defun jn/org-web-en-complete ()
  (jn/org-web-complete "en"))

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (org-link-set-parameters "de" :complete #'jn/org-web-de-complete)
  (org-link-set-parameters "en" :complete #'jn/org-web-en-complete))

(Latest version in my dotemacs.)

At the end I am registering the completions to be called through org-insert-link using de: or en:. This integration is great. No new keybinding are needed and I can use it through my full-featured org-insert-link-dwim.

That’s it :) Have a great day!

References #