Sebastien Vauban <wxhgmqzgw...@spammotel.com> wrote: > You have to make that customization *before* loading Org in your .emacs file. > Weird, never really understood why, but that's like that. >
The point is that the value of org-emphasis-alist (as well as the value of org-emphasis-regexp-components) is used in order to calculate the value of org-emph-re by calling the function org-set-emph-re afterwards: it's org-emph-re that's used for the all the gory calculations, not org-emphasis-alist, which just provides a nicer interface. So if you arrange to call the org-set-emph-re function afterwards, you can change org-emphasis-alist at any time. Customize makes it easy, in that it does that automatically (see the :set property of org-emphasis-alist). If you do the setq before loading org, then what happens is that when the defcustom is encountered, the value of the :set property (a function) is called: the modified value of org-emphasis-alist is then used to calculate org-emph-re, instead of the original default. If you do it after, none of that happens and it's as if you never changed it. Nick PS BTW, the docstring for the variable says: "Use customize to modify this, or restart Emacs after changing it" but I'm not sure that's correct: if you change the variable in one session, the value is not going to be propagated to the next session, unless you use customize or put the setq in .emacs. In the latter case, it's not going to work unless you do it the way Seb describes: set it before loading Org. So restarting emacs is *not* enough. Am I missing something?