​I’ve started hacking on an editing mode for Django templates in Emacs. (Please note that this is the first time I ever do Emacs Lisp, and that what I currently have is nothing more than a start. If you can come up with fixes or improvements, these are much appreciated).

The most obvious benefit that it provides at the moment is syntax highlighting of variables and blocks.

It knows about the Django default tag names and uses a different coloring for comments. At the moment it is configured to automatically kick-in for files with extension .djhtml (I made it up that way, in order not to clash with other defaults one may have with .html files). Of course you can invoke it with M-x django-mode in any buffer.

You can get it here: ​http://unicoders.org/code/hacks/trunk/django-mode.el

Put it somewhere where Emacs can find it then add this line to your .emacs file:

(load "django-mode.el")

This is a sample screenshot of the results with the “Charcoal Black” ​color theme:

​http://cavedoni.com/2006/08/emacs-django-template.png