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Asked: 2026-05-10T17:34:36+00:00

When editing HTML in emacs, is there a way to automatically pretty-format a blob

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When editing HTML in emacs, is there a way to automatically pretty-format a blob of markup, changing something like this:

  <table>   <tr> <td>blah</td></tr></table>

…into this:

<table>  <tr>   <td>    blah   </td>  </tr> </table>
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1 Answer

  1. By default, when you visit a .html file in Emacs (22 or 23), it will put you in html-mode. That is probably not what you want. You probably want nxml-mode, which is seriously fancy. nxml-mode seems to only come with Emacs 23, although you can download it for earlier versions of emacs from the nXML web site. There is also a Debian and Ubuntu package named nxml-mode. You can enter nxml-mode with:

    M-x nxml-mode

    You can view nxml mode documentation with:

    C-h i g (nxml-mode) RET

    All that being said, you will probably have to use something like Tidy to re-format your xhtml example. nxml-mode will get you from

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>   <head></head> <body> <table>   <tr> <td>blah</td></tr></table> </body>

    to

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>   <head></head>   <body>     <table>       <tr>     <td>blah</td></tr></table> </body> </html>

    but I don’t see a more general facility to do line breaks on certain xml tags as you want. Note that C-j will insert a new line with proper indentation, so you may be able to do a quick macro or hack up a defun that will do your tables.

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