Editing Django templates with Emacs

This page lists some helpers to edit django templates with the Emacs editor.

• ​nXhtml and django-html-mumamo-mode
• ​django-mode
• ​django-html-mode
• ​Yasnippet

django-html-mumamo-mode

Status: works well.

MUltiple MAjor MOde is an extension for Emacs that allows one buffer to use multiple modes for different stretches of text. It's bundled with ​nXhtml, and now includes a django-html-mumamo-mode for Django templates. This uses django-mode from django-mode.el above for the django parts and html-mode for the html parts. (In addition it uses css-mode for css parts etc.)

django-html-mumamo-mode provides:

• Syntax highlighting aka font locking
• Indentation of template tags
• ... and all the benefits of ​nXhtml

To get nXHTML (includes django-html-mumamo-mode), download the nxHTML package release directly from the web site at: ​http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/DL/elisp/nxhtml/zip/nxhtml-2.08-100425.zip

Downloading it from the Launchpad branch site will give you the latest snapshot, but there may be issues with the latest build so it is not recommend.

And append:

(load "~/.emacs.d/nxhtml/autostart.el")
(setq mumamo-background-colors nil) 
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.html$" . django-html-mumamo-mode))

to your .emacs. See the issue reported at ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1146701/turning-off-chunk-coloring-in-emacs-nxhtml-mode to understand why the setq statement is needed. The add-to-list line is used to force any HTML file loaded into django-html-mumamo-mode.

To use django-html-mumamo-mode run:

M-x django-html-mumamo-mode

Sample screenshot:

django-mode

Status: old, download link does not work.

​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 (link dead)

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:

django-html-mode

Status: unmaintained.

There is another emacs django template mode. It is derived mode from html (sgml).

There is an updated and improved version of this mode on: ​https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~eopadoan/+junk/django-html-mode

• Updated the supported tags to current (django 1.0b3).
• Added auto-close command ( C-c ] ).

To get, run on a shell:

bzr branch lp:~eopadoan/+junk/django-html-mode

Note: The django-html-mode code does not appear to support template tag indentation.

Yasnippet

If you are using ​Yasnippet, you can get the ​django-mode with many useful snippets. To get, run on a shell:

cd /tmp
mkdir ~/.emacs/plugins

bzr branch lp:python-mode
bzr branch lp:django-mode

mv /tmp/python-mode/python-mode.el ~/.emacs.d
mv /tmp/django-mode/*.el ~/.emacs.d
mv /tmp/django-mode/snippets ~/.emacs.d/plugins

And append something like:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet-0.6.1c")
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet-0.6.1c/snippets")
(require 'django-html-mode)
(require 'django-mode)
(yas/load-directory "~/.emacs.d/plugins/django-mode/snippets")

to your .emacs.

The django-mode yasnippets code depend on python-mode.el, so it also has to be downloaded. Note: there is a difference between python.el (which comes with the native Emacs distribution) and python-mode.el, which has to be downloaded separately.

Also, if you use django-html-mumamo-mode, you should not use Ysnippet since the automatic template tag indenting will not function correctly with the Ysnippet django-html-mode and django-mode code loaded.