Exporting literal code blocks verbatim from org-mode

Nov 12, 2023 (updated Jul 1, 2024). 263 words. 2 minutes. In Tech. Emacs orgmode

tl;dr:How to export verbatim org-mode code with one single character.

The problem #

I just wanted to share one quick lesson that I learned by accident today for future me and everyone, who stumbles in here via Google et al.

While I was writing a blog post, I came upon the following challenge: I want to export an org-mode code block itself, i.e., #+BEGIN_SRC ... #+END_SRC verbatim, because I was writing about literal configs in org-mode. I could probably export the whole snippet as verbatim somehow, but I want it displayed as a code block with line numbers and stuff, so it must be wrapped inside another code block. Simply nesting the two does not work, as the first #+END_SRC terminates the whole block.

The solution #

Google did not turn up any results or (more likely) I was trying the wrong search query, but by accident I found a solution myself.

When I pasted a few lines of org-mode config (#+PROPERTY fields to be specific, but I do not think that it matters) into an org-mode code block, Emacs/org-mode automatically added a , in front of every line. Testing this solution for other org-mode code, like #+BEGIN_SRC lines, proved that this is indeed the solution:

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#+BEGIN_SRC org-mode
,#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :tangle code.el
(setq my-cool-variable "hello world")
,#+END_SRC
#+END_SRC

By the way, to display this code snippet I had to nest the whole thing twice, so three code blocks in total, one of which you cannot see.

Neat solution for a rather niche problem, very happy to have solved this one! Hope it helps anyone else staring at the same issue.