An emacs mode for quarto

Quarto-mode is an emacs mode for editing quarto documents.

Installing

quarto-mode is available on MELPA. From emacs,

M-x package-refresh-contents
M-x package-install
  quarto-mode

Using quarto-mode

Add this to your .emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el file:

;; load the library
(require 'quarto-mode)

The quarto-mode package will associate a quarto polymode to .qmd files. That means that there isn't an actual quarto-mode mode. If you want to associate other files to the quarto polymode, you should use poly-quarto-mode, such as:

;; Note that the following is not necessary to run quarto-mode in .qmd files! It's merely illustrating
;; how to associate different extensions to the mode.
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.Rmd\\'" . poly-quarto-mode))

;; Or, with use-package:
(use-package quarto-mode
  :mode (("\\.Rmd" . poly-quarto-mode))
  )

Dependencies

Quarto-mode requires the following packages to be installed:

• (polymode "0.2.2")
• (poly-markdown "0.2.2")
• (markdown-mode "2.3")
• (request "0.3.2")

quarto-mode + ESS

If you have ESS, quarto-mode will use it. Otherwise, it won't. Specifically, quarto-mode does not depend on ESS (or R), which means that if you want to use those features, you have to install ESS separately.

Features

• M-x quarto-preview. Start a quarto preview server. If the current buffer has an associated file that exists in a quarto project, the command will preview the entire project. Otherwise, it will preview the specific file.
• Integration with poly-markdown's compilation. The default poly-markdown configuration runs plain pandoc on the document; quarto-mode uses quarto render.

Differences in behavior between quarto-mode and markdown-mode

• C-c C-c * behavior

  quarto-mode uses features specific to quarto that make it behave differently from what markdown-mode users might expect. By default, quarto-mode uses quarto preview, which works through a custom web server, and does not produce disk output upon preview. quarto preview is significantly faster than rerendering entire files in interactive mode, so we encourage you to use it.

  However, if you wish to not use quarto preview and instead depend on the typical rendering mode of previewing, you can restore the standard markdown-mode behavior by changing the quarto-force-preview customization variable.