Re: Proposal: 'executable' org-capture-templaes

[Arthur Miller]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Simplicity comes from the org-templates. Me, and I guess other people are
>> familiar with org-catpure templates already, and I mean, can it be simpler to
>> create a menu of choices then a simple list:
>>
>> '(("key1" "label1" exec (lambda () ...))
>>   ("key2" "label2" exec (labmda () ...))
>>    ...
>>    )
>>
>> People are already writing those as part of org-capture, so there is a
>> familiarity factor. Transient has to be learned, and the complexity is much
>> bigger.
>
>>>                                                   If anything, capture
>>> menu might be factored out to a generic menu framework.
>>
>> Please no. Not every single piece of Emacs has to be a generalized
>> framework. Generalized frameworks add an extra layer of complexity, and it 
>> this
>> case, as you point out, we have other frameworks, so yet another framework is
>> *definitely* not what I ask for.
>
> By "generic" I did not mean general-purpose all-functional framework.
> We just need something to remove code duplication in
> org-export-dispatch, org-agenda, org-capture, org-set-tags-command, etc
> They all share pretty similar code to generate dialogues.
>
> As for familiarity, I understand and it is exactly the reason why I
> suggested to factor out the menu code from capture templates.

I am not really familiar with those other dialogues but org-capture, so I only
had that one in the mind. Yes, I agree if the similar code is used/shared in
several places than it does make sense to refactor it out.

> I am strongly not in favor of adding exec to org-capture itself. It's
> a bit like if you were to add :activate-func for a link that actually
> downloads some file from internet, then generates and exports agenda,
> and meanwhile also restarts your remote server. This will also kind of
> save the code, but completely out of purpose of :activate-func. Of
> course, I am exaggerating here, but just want to make my point clear.

I understand, it is ok :).

>>> We actually had multiple threads discussing possibility to port all the
>>> Org dialogues to transient.
>>
>> I have unfortunately missed those discussions. But as said, I am not in to 
>> argue
>> for or against transient at all. I would just like to re-use the org-capture
>> code, since it is already in-place.
>
> The last one was
> https://orgmode.org/list/8c364693bf6856e60cdd3e8b63ab0c9284d16733.camel@heagren.com
> And we had multiple complaints that Org menus are not searchable and do
> not allow recursive edit.

I am not sure what complain about searchability is/was, so I should not say much
there, but those are just a list of lists, saved in a well-known place,
org-caputre-templates var, so one can always traverse that list, or search the
menu buffer itself. Anyway thanks for the link, I have read through
that discussion. Seems to me like most of you are in favour of refactoring org
to use transient everywhere?

>>> It seems to be quite out of scope of org-capture.
>>
>> Maybe, but than what is in scope of org-mode or org-capture or Emacs? We are
>> constantly bending code to do what it is not really meant to do. Since to be 
>> a
>> DNA of Emacs :).
>
> Sure. But another feature of Emacs is being consistent. Emacs does
> provide flexible interfaces, but they stick to they purpose. Abusing
> them is up to the user (with no guarantees to work in future versions),
> but not up to Emacs itself.
>
> If we were to include your suggestion, we would also need to maintain
> the new generalized functionality in future. Even if we need to change
> some internals of org-capture. Over-generalization will put an extra
> burden on future maintenance.

Np, I understand. Thanks for the answer anyway.

Best regards
/a