Chinese 12-Year-Cycle Animals as Org-mode Heading Icons

Ideas about Org-mode Headings

As an outlining tool, Emacs org-mode has a hierarchical organization of contents. Headings, as the scaffold of a document, should be descriptive, prominent, and expressive. There are several ways to make headings conspicuous:

• large, bold fonts
• light colors
• strange (I mean good-looking) org-bullets.¹

Recently I changed my org-bullets to Chinese 12-year-cycle animals, which are well-known by every person in China. Not only being interesting, but this setting is also very convenient for me since I can easily tell in which level I’m currently writing. Well, this actually depends on how familiar with the animals you are.

Customization of Emacs

After installing org-bullets, set the variable org-bullets-bullet-list through M-x customize, or add this to your configuration file:

(custom-set-variables '(org-bullets-bullet-list (quote ("🐭" "🐮" "🐯" "🐰" "🐲" "🐍" "🐴" "🐑" "🙉" "🐔" "🐶" "🐷"))))

How to Memorize the 12-Animal Cycle

As far as I can remember, when I was 5 years old, my mother taught me to recite the animal cycle four-by-four:

鼠牛虎兔， 龙蛇马羊， 猴鸡狗猪。

But I prefer this way:

鼠牛虎， 兔龙蛇， 马羊猴， 鸡狗猪。