A Short Elfeed Story: From How Do I Get a Link to Copy as Markdown

June 23, 2024

Last night I left some unread articles in Elfeed. Reading RSS in Emacs gives me a great fuzzy, geeky feeling. So even if I’m a long time Reeder user, most recently I’ve been using Elfeed more and more. Even more since I have found how to patch a bug that was making it unsable; but I’m getting in the wrong direction.

While in Elfeed, I asked myself: how do I get the link of the current item I’m reading? Bringing up the mode help, I landed my eyes on elfeed-kill-link-url-at-point bound to c. It took me a bit to realize that this was not what I was looking for; still a very useful functionl. What I was looking for is elfeed-show-yank bound to y. I am happy already. Again the thought that “Emacs gives you everything. And more. You just need to keep looking” popped in my mind. And I was ready to move on.

But then the second question came: how do I get the title of the current item? This smelled like an opportunity to look into some ELisp code—yes, I’m fascinated by Lisp and ELisp is the closest I got to it. Recently I learned that after opening the help of a function, I can actually go and see the source of the function. Time again for “Emacs gives you everything…”

From here things evolved much faster: if I can get the title, how about being able to copy as Markdown? The code I wrote to get this functionality is minimal. Why? You already know the answer! It’s thanks to the fact that “Emacs gives you everything.” I have found all the functions I needed in El

I have found all the functions I needed in Elfeed right away.

(defun alpo/elfeed-show-yank-markdown ()
  "Copy the title and link to current entry as markdown."
  (interactive)
  (let ((link (elfeed-entry-link elfeed-show-entry))
        (title (elfeed-entry-title elfeed-show-entry)))
    (kill-new (format "[%s](%s)" title link))
    (message "Yanked [%s](%s)" title link)))