Re: [O] A Microsoftesque detail in org

[Brett Witty]

I agree with Rasmus' position. Just because the org format is plain text, doesn't mean the Emacs keybindings have to act identically to, say, Notepad. Otherwise, what's Emacs for? Similarly, I don't expect TAB to insert tabs into an org-mode document.

While there can be a bit of a culture shock getting used to org's "do the useful thing" as opposed to "do the literal thing", I think it's an advantage of the system, not a disadvantage. Headers are sacred in org-mode, so breaking headers with RET seems suboptimal when there's vastly more things you'd care about. Similarly in tables, or drawers or timestamps or...

That said, it would be nice to have some sort of customization variable to allow the literal behaviour, but set by default to the current behaviour (similar to org-support-shift-select).

BrettW

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Rasmus <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Jarmo,

Jarmo Hurri <address@hidden> writes:

> Rasmus <address@hidden> writes:

>> With your behavior you can (i) break the TODO tag; (ii) break the cookie;
>> (iii) break the tag.  At least (i) and (ii) are quite destructive.
>
> I am not sure what you mean, since a single undo will always heal the
> line again, regardless of where you break it.

Sure.  But that seems orthogonal to the problem at hand.  Re (i): Assume
TODO is keyword.  We don't know that TO is.  Re (ii): [#B] is a cookie.
[#B is not.  (iii) iii :tag: is a tag :ta is not.  The editor should not
easily produce invalid syntax.

In any case it's very easy to rebind keys in a hook.  If you write a
org.texi patch on how to get purist keybindings we can add it.

> I am a BIG fan of the Org mode slogan "Your life in plain text." The
> power of plain text has been demonstrated over and over again. You can
> run text manipulating commands on it, you can process it with a large
> array of different programming languages.

Nobody is disputing that.

> An undo is a basic text editing feature that everyone should
> know. Reassigning non-standard behaviour to the return key is - in my
> opinion - against the ideology.

I see that you use Gnus.  Did you by any change use RET to open the
article?  It's bound to gnus-summary-scroll-up.

In Emacs25, or maybe even before, RET in at least lisp mode started to
indent automatically via electric-indent-mode.  Are you against this?

What I will agree on is that it would be better if Org used more
"standard" mechanism and e.g. cleverly hooked newline.  However, Org
targets a number of versions of Emacs (ATM: 23-25), making this hard.

>> The attached patch re-enables breaks in region four of
>> org-complex-heading-regexp, i.e. from the cookie up to tags.  A quick
>> test suggests it works nicely.
>>
>> WDYT?
>
> Given enough time, I could come up with a situation where I would run a
> keyboard macro in which I would expect the return key to break the line,
> regardless of where I was on that line (in a tag or whatever).

In that case there's C-o C-e or M-x newline...

> I am a very minor player in this game, but I would really, _really_ like
> Org to remain as true to it's slogan as possible.

I'm still don't see this point.  There's Org, "the format", which should
ideally be easy to use in any editor (I wrote a basic syntax parser for
texworks).  It's plaintext.  Then there's org-mode, the principal editor
of Org.  It supposed to be a nice environment for composing text.

—Rasmus

--
This is the kind of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put