When I'm writing documentation in Markdown I like, where possible, to mark up keys with the <kbd> tag. This was the reason for one of the updates to BlogMore: I'd not done any good default markup for <kbd> and the moment I realised, I knew I had to fix it.

Now that I'm writing more on this blog, and especially about coding, I'm mentioning keys pretty often (even more so given I'm doing a lot of tidying up of my Emacs Lisp packages). The thing is though: I find having to type out <kbd> and </kbd> kind of tedious, and it's something I mistype from time to time. I guess I could use some sort of HTML tag inserting tool or whatever, but I got to thinking that it would be handy if I could point an Emacs command at a particular sequence in a buffer and have it mark up the whole thing.

This resulted in a small bit of code I'm calling kbdify.el. It's pretty simple, if point is sat on some text that looks like this:

C-M-S-s-<up>

and I run kbdify I get this:

<kbd>C</kbd>-<kbd>M</kbd>-<kbd>S</kbd>-<kbd>s</kbd>-<kbd>&lt;up&gt;</kbd>

The result rendering as C-M-S-s-<up>.

I could probably take it a bit further, have it optionally work on a region and stuff like that, but even in its current simplistic form it's going to be loads quicker and a lot more accurate and will probably perfectly cover 99% of the times I need it. There is the issue that it's not going to handle something like M-x some-command RET in the way I might like, but then again some-command isn't a key. Like, does it make more sense to have:

M-x some-command RET

anyway? Personally I think this:

M-x some-command RET

probably makes more sense.

I think I'm good for now.