Making Org-Babel Reactive

Abhinav Tushar (he/him) - https://lepisma.xyz, @lepisma@mathstodon.xyz, abhinav@lepisma.xyz

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2025-12-06. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Format: 10-min talk ; Q&A: Etherpad https://pad.emacsconf.org/2025-org-babel
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Description

In Org mode, you can add and execute small snippets of code using Org-Babel. This lets you have an extremely useful mixed-language notebook like environment inside Emacs. These days, many notebook systems provide fully reactive notebooks where changes made in any cell or variable propagate to its dependents without manual execution. This pattern is very useful for exploratory data analysis, visualization, and many other use-cases that notebooks are generally good for.

Unsurprisingly, we can enable such reactivity in Org-Babel without too much effort. In this talk, I will cover how to do that while also adding certain other interaction niceties to make full use of the resultant reactivity.

About the speaker:

I am a programmer and machine learning engineer, and I have enjoyed working with Org-Babel code blocks inside my writings. Other notebooks and platforms have recently started to adopt fully reactive computation, which is something I have liked a lot for exploratory analysis. In this talk, I will show how to add similar reactivity in Org-Babel.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail abhinav@lepisma.xyz