SKskimdesk·May 18, 2023
One more tool to accomplish this is lmt [0] which, despite minimal documentation, is quite pleasing to use.
[0] https://github.com/driusan/lmt
In Literate Programming: Articlesdriusan
lmt
Go2018–2023
driusan / lmt
lmt
literate markdown tangle
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
183GitHub stars
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What it is
literate markdown tangle
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Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-10-05 14:05:48 UTC to 2023-05-18 16:16:05 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesI personally use literate programming to maintain my "dotfiles", mainly NixOS [1], and I _love_ it. I like to describe all possible alternative tools, why I don't use them, possible tools that look nice, random ideas and blog posts that describe parts of my config, add TODOs and screenshots, ... in short everything that is really ugly to do inside source code comments. Also I gain structure; adding headings to a 3000 LOC config is very nice.
For tangling I use lmt [2], as it works with Markdown and also play nice with Emanote [3] (full syntax highlighting inside the code blocks.). That means all my "dotfiles" are inside my Zettelkasten [4] and can be navigated like any other note I have.
[1]: https://nixos.org/
[2]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt
[3]: https://github.com/srid/emanote
[4]: https://zettelkasten.de/
In Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)I switched to NixOS half a year ago. The reason? I fell in love with literate programming (I use [1]); being able to write (and read) your whole OS configuration is the dream!
There are few bad sides to NixOS though.
The community consists mostly of programmers, which means I am missing some creative tools (mockups, mindmaps, ..). In the future I will be able to provide/build them myself, but it is not a smooth transition from my previous arch setup.
Also the whole documentation sucks: There are three (!) official manuals + the home-manager manual + Nix pills + YT + random blogs where I have to piece everything together.
Still I find NixOS superior to every other OS (windows, linux) I have tried so far. I just feel free and am not afraid to fuck up anything [2], as I can just go to a previous generation when it doesn't boot.
Lastly, I ca
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n save my whole config in git and am free to try new tools -- If I don't like them, I just remove their line in my config. No more chasing after random install folders! (Except in home..)
[1]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt
[2]: All the "hacker" stuff: kernel modules, network hardening, ...
> And I'm also unsure whether he needs to build the list of include statements like I do or whether that's somehow captured in the annotation itself.
> the workflow could be better. In the example above, we had to define the function body, prelude, if statement, else statement and both if/else blocks.
> It would be much better if we could inverse this: defining the whole function block with holes for the if/else blocks that the code generation would put in.
The original CWEB and newer NOWEB do handle these things a bit better - sections can be defined and included in any order, and sections can define which file their in.
It lends itself particularly well to laying out a program "top down", ie:
We define the utility ctof as consisting of a c file: ctof.c.
It has the following structure:
standard header includes
defining constants for conv
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ersion
defining the function ctof that converts a float value of degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit, returning a float
A help procedure that prints help
A main function that parses command line parameters, and conditionally call the help procedure or ctof function... Etc
Then can go on to define the inner bit of ctof first (the calculation).
In general literate programming is very nice. It can be a bit of a challenge when breaking out small sections (we define a loop that iterates over an array like so...) - because of scoping issues - if the programming language discourages many small (max 10 lines) functions/procedures.
At that point the literate system itself takes on the role of a macro assembler of sorts - which can work with old school "structured programming" - short programs, well defined global state (a few array/lists, a few "in" and "out" global variables).
See eg: http://literateprogramming.com/cweb_download.html (historic relevance)
http://leoeditor.com/ (not sure if it's alive - an interesting idea in "all literate, all the time"
https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/ modern-ish take on literate programming - if you want LaTeX for the document part
Finally, the most pragmatic variant I'm aware of - literate markdown tangle - which might be close enough to what's in op to encourage a port:
https://github.com/driusan/lmt/blob/master/README.md
I think I gonna try https://github.com/driusan/lmt
I like that it is markdown and that it has a many-to-many mapping of input to output files.
In Literate raytracer: a simple implementation of raytracing in Javascript