Re: [NEW FEATURE] org-hlc.el - hidden-lines-cookies (hlc) for Org-mode

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com> writes:

> it happened again [...]- François Pinard already had a fully fledged
> implementation of my "new" org-mode feature: 'org-weights.el'

You're quite generous when you say "full fledged" :-).  There are many
details in which I find org-weights.el unsatisfactory, but as it is
sufficient as it stands for my day-to-day usage, I'm not overly pushing
on it (the pun is purely accidental).

> | * Header 1                       *    2 + 1...

> | ## * Header 1   [#1]

I find the "*    2 + 1" far too verbose, in that it uses too much horizontal
space, I much prefer the compact aspect of "[#1]".  What would be ideal,
but I do not know if it can be organized, would keep the weights or
hidden-lines information always glued to the ellipsis, and not hiding
any underlying text as org-weights currently does.  On the other hand,
there are some virtue to the vertical alignment of weight information.
Sigh!  Nothing is perfect...

> [...] shows the overlay-info for *all* headlines except the one where
> point is on.

That exception is a sad and questionable workaround, for being able to
edit the current line.  When, in normal and standard Org mode, I edit a
line which has an ellipsis at the end, I may edit the line like any
other one without seeing undesired effects.  org-weights should be
equally capable, and there should be no reason (ideally) to hide the
information for the line where the point is, merely for editing to work.

> one problem I hit is that a visibility change does not uptdate all
> cookies/weights at once, they are only updated headline per headline
> when point is moved up and down.  Is that for performance reasons?

See the Caveats section at the end of org-weights documentation.
Normally, the information to be updated may be minimized to the header
above the line holding point, and then, recursively up.  But there is a
bug in this optimization when a header is demoted (as explained in
Caveats).  Another performance-related detail is the quadratic behaviour
which may be seen in big, deeply nested Org files: it could be avoided
by cleverly saving (in a hidden way) information on computations already
done, and reusing it instead of recomputing it many times.  But as usual
with most cached optimization, it is difficult to get fully right.

François