Re: [O] (no subject)

[Bastien]

Hi Terry,

I hear you.  I completely agree that Org should not be less flexible
than it has been so far.  At least not for very good reasons, shared
by both the developers and the users.  IOW: ease of maintainance and
code consistency should not let us introduce rigidity for the users.

Let's focus on the regressions and let's try to fix the ones that we
can fix.

As discussions have shown so far, Nicolas holds the keys when it comes
to honoring Org's consistency regarding its syntax -- the document he
wrote will help us all to speak about the same syntax and rules.  But
as you may have felt, I'm more on the "user conveniency" side, even if
we need to sacrifice some consistency.  There is a balance here, and I
hope we keep a good one.

So as I said: let's focus on what you perceive as regressions wrt what
Org allows.

The subject of this thread does not fall in this category: headlines
have always been starting with stars, there is no regression here.  On
the contrary: a few years ago, we had no answer to this FAQ, now we
can help users with several solution when the problem is aesthetic.

Finally, I agree with Suvayu that the problem *is* mostly aesthetic,
so the solutions we provide are enough (i.e., the FAQ, org-bullets.el
in contrib/.)  The question is rather whether we should have an Org
option in core to allow users to tweak the appearance of the stars:
my answer here is "no", because I don't see why users would stop here.
Once we offer such an option for headlines, why not for comments and
other characters with a syntactic role?  (I replied a question on
stackoverflow on how to use "%" instead of "#" for comments...)

Anyway -- Org still stands on the side of users' freedom, let's
fix the real regressions.

Thanks!

-- 
 Bastien