md-readme.el --- Markdown-formatted READMEs for your ELisp

Copyright (C) 2009 Thomas Kappler

• Author: Thomas Kappler tkappler@gmail.com
• Created: 2009 November 07
• Keywords: lisp, help, readme, markdown, header, documentation, github
• URL: http://github.com/thomas11/md-readme/tree/master

This file is not part of GNU Emacs.

Licensed under the GPL version 3 or later.

Commentary

The git-based source code hosting site http://github.com has lately become popular for Emacs Lisp projects. Github has a feature that displays files named "README[.suffix]" automatically on a project's main page. If these files are formatted in Markdown, the formatting is interpreted. See http://github.com/guides/readme-formatting for more information.

Emacs Lisp files customarily have a header in a fairly standardized format. md-readme extracts this header, re-formats it to Markdown, and writes it to the file "README.md" in the same directory. If you put your code on github, you could have this run automatically, for instance upon saving the file or from a git pre-commit hook, so you always have an up-to-date README on github.

It recognizes headings, the GPL license disclaimer which is replaced by a shorter notice linking to the GNU project's license website, lists, and normal paragraphs. It escapes `backtick-quoted' names so they will display correctly. Lists are somewhat tricky to recognize automatically, and the program employs a very simple heuristic currently.

Dependencies

None.

Installation

(require 'md-readme), then you can call mdr-generate manually. I have not found a way to call it automatically that I really like, but here is one that works for me:

(require 'md-readme)
(dir-locals-set-class-variables
 'generate-README-with-md-readme
 '((emacs-lisp-mode . ((mdr-generate-readme . t)))))
(dolist (dir '("~/Projects/wpmail/" "~/Projects/md-readme/"))
  (dir-locals-set-directory-class
   dir 'generate-README-with-md-readme))
(add-hook 'after-save-hook
          '(lambda () (if (boundp 'mdr-generate-readme) (mdr-generate))))

Binaries

bin/md-readme is a shell script that will generate readme.md for the passed file. See it for usage instructions.

History

• 2009-11: First release.