I’ve been writing a bunch of rust code lately, and it’s been a pretty great experience! The thing I enjoy most about it is that the documentation looks just so extremely good.

Which brings me to my major point of frustration with my rust-writing setup: Writing doc comments in emacs’s otherwise excellent rust-mode is a pain. You always have to insert the doc comment character sequence de la ligne, and writing doctest examples was even worse: You write rust code, inside markdown, in rust comments. Add smartparens and other helper packages, and editing gets really annoying pretty fast.

So, I decided to look around for solutions, and found something pretty cool: Fanael’s edit-indirect is an emacs package that will take lines from the current buffer, put them into a new buffer, transform them, apply a major mode, and then let you edit them. When you’re done, you apply the changes back to the original buffer. If this sounds like org-edit-src-code, that’s because it’s directly inspired by it. (-:

So I wrote this piece of elisp glue to help my rustdoc editing experience, and so far it’s pretty great: Navigate to a rustdoc comment, hit C-c ' (the same keys you’d use in a literate org file), up pops a buffer in markdown-mode; edit that and then hit C-c ' again to apply the changes back to the original buffer. Easy!

If you write rust in emacs, I hope you’ll try this out and if you do, let me know how it works for you!