Adding Local Variables

I am setting up my blog withorg-static-blog which requires me to define a number of variables. The best way to do this is using .dir-locals.el.

Not knowing how to code in elisp I tried to do this by hand with disasterous results.

I next turned to our new friends Gemini, CoPilot and ChatGPT. This was better, but by no means perfect.

I went back to the Internet and did some searches. Yay! There's a command to add variables to the .dir-locals.el file. It keeps track of all the parenthesies. You invoke it with

m-x add-direct-local-variable

I think you need a file called ~.dir-locals.el in the directory already. You certainly need to be in that directory before executing the command.

You can shorten this variable to add-v. Be aware that you need to cursor up once to get the right command. Press return.

The command is in three parts.

1. The mode. The response here is nil. This is generic and applies to all modes.
2. The variable name. Again, press return.
3. Its value. If it is a string, enclose the string in double quotes ". Press return a final time.

Repetition of these steps will build the .dir-locals.el file.

A final note: You will be prompted when you open your first file in this directory if you want to use these local variables. y would seem the best response since you have gone to all the trouble to set it up.