Re: Checkboxes in headings - opinions wanted

[Arthur Miller]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Arthur,
>
> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Last night I have been playing with a minor mode to enable a checkbox in
>> a heading, or rather to fake a checkbox.
>
> Interesting, thanks.
>
> For now you can use statistics cookies in headline:
> https://orgmode.org/manual/Checkboxes.html
>
> What would perhaps make sense would be to support [ ]/[X] on top of
> the already supported [0%]/[100%] and [0/n]/[n/n].
>
> What do you think?  (I tried your mode and unless I didn't try it
> correctly, it does not seem to do that.)

Indeed, it does not do that :). It was explicitly designed to work
independently of TODO tasks/progress, so I can use it side by side with
TODO labels. With other words I just needed a plain old GUI-style
checkbox to indicate on/off value. As I understand stats checkboxes are
displaying progress based on TODO tasks and list checkboxes, so they can
not be used independently of TODO states. Maybe I am wrong, I never used
them to be honest, so I am not sure how much and what is possible there.

Anyway, I am not sure how interesting is this to a wider org-mode
community. Org-mode seems to be geared mostly toward process tracking
which is of course great for project and tasks tracking. However, I see
lots of useful things in org-mode outside of project tracking for some
other strucutured data. Example can be seen in attached screenshot from
my init file where I use org headings to form a list of packages to
install, and checkboxes to indicate if a package configuration is used
or not. 

I was able to re-purpose TODO keywords to act as checkboxes, the other
day, and it worked very well, I can "switch on/off states" with
S-left/right arrows, and I was able to disable initial and done states,
so arrows just shift between [x] and [ ] states. But that locks todo
states to this particular sequence. If I would like to be able to use
TODO states in their normal context, I can't. I needed a more "general
purpose" checkbox, so I wrote that small minor mode.

The biggest problem is, I am not sure how to connect a function per
checkbox in some convenient and simple to use way yet, I am still
thinking what would be the easiest way to add programmability, and I am
not sure why empty checkbox losses fontification.

screenshot.png
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