Re: [O] [RFC] Org Minor Mode?

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Bastien <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Bastien,

> Thorsten Jolitz <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> So I would rather have a clear picture of the 'political situation' wrt
>> to org-minor-mode and some technical discussion first. But anyway, I
>> will not have time to work on this again before June.
>
> I for one need to have a clearer picture of what such a minor mode
> would really do, without getting prematurily lost in the details of
> possible implementations.

Its just a better and smarter outshine-mode (major-mode agnostic "Org
look&feel" for programming modes). 

> Once we have a clear goal, let's build a small list of steps, then
> submit a patch for the first step.  (We can then work on a separate
> branch for the whole feature, and spend months on this branch.)

The goal for org-minor-mode would be the same like for outshine - give
programming mode buffers the same look&feel like Org-mode buffers. This
works already quite good with outshine, I structure all my elisp,
picolisp, R, CSS (etc etc) files like Org files, and when I switch between
them and Org-files I hardly notice a difference wrt navigation, folding,
structure editing, fontification etc. 

But the backend for outshine is outline-(minor)-mode. Org-mode does some
things better than outline-mode, and tons of things outline-mode can't
do. 

> If the change is relying on too many external libraries, it is not
> very likely to happen.

It should end up as one new library (e.g. omm.el) that is part of
Org-mode, replacing both orgstruct-mode and outshine. 

> The feature seems to bring interest, but let's refrain from spending
> our enthusiasm in early and lengthy discussions that nobody can fully
> follow, especially if you won't have time to hack something before
> June...

outshine, outorg and navi-mode are all in the mid-range of popular melpa
packages, so there seems to be some real demand ...

> So I really don't want to play the cold fish here, but let's move
> with code and small steps rather than discussions and big goals.

I started with code (https://github.com/tj64/omm), but faced the
fundamental problem of hardcoded regexps (^, $, and \\*) all over the
Org sources that make Org functions fail on outcommented headers and in
outcommented text sections in general. 

The goals, ideas and even implementations (outshine, orgstruct) are
already there, a first intent to merge them into one library exists
(omm.el), but what to do about this core problem?

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten