Re: [PATCH] Add mode for automatically unhiding emphasis markers in the current region

[Gustavo Barros <gusbrs.2016@gmail.com>]

Hi Nicolas,
Hi All,

On Sun, 05 Jul 2020 at 17:49, Gustavo Barros <gusbrs.2016@gmail.com> 
wrote:

> A fourth issue is point placement after the emphasis is 
> added. `org-emphasis'
> takes a stance here and places point within the emphasis. I do agree 
> with this
> option, but it is still true that sometimes, one might want or need 
> otherwise.
> This, of course, gets more interesting when 
> `org-hide-emphasis-markers' is t.
> And I actually think this issue is still more general.  One thing is 
> to "add
> emphasis markers to existing text", another is "adding text around 
> existing
> emphasis markers".  The first one is superbly dealt with by this
> implementation of `org-emphasize', the second one, as far as I can 
> see, not
> equally so.

After sleeping over this problem, I think I had an interesting idea to 
allow some control of point position in an intuitive fashion.  I thus 
submit it to the list.

Consider the following suggested behavior for `org-emphasize':  i) 
anything in the direction opposite to the emphasis expansion direction 
is ignored, regardless of whether point is at a word boundary or not on 
that side (this corresponds to the current implementation, but goes 
against my initial suggestion of considering the right boundary of a 
word as "part" of the previous word); ii) point never moves (and this is 
different from the current implementation).

Simple, clear cut rules.  And they would make it possible to control 
whether point is placed within or outside the emphasis markers by 
manipulating point position wrt whitespace /before/ calling 
`org-emphasize'.  So, taking the current forward expansion direction, if 
we wanted to emphasize the following word, we would have: i) if the 
point is placed before whitespace preceding the following word, point 
will be left where is is, which will result to be outside the emphasis 
markers; ii) if point is within a word (which includes the left 
boundary) point will end inside the markers; it also hasn't moved, just 
the marker was applied before it.

Some examples, again assuming forward expansion:

#+begin_src org
foo|·bar
foo·|bar
foo·b|ar
foo·bar|
#+end_src

for `M-o *', the results would be:

#+begin_src org
foo|·*bar*
foo·*|bar*
foo·*b|ar*
foo·bar|
#+end_src

Assuming a backwards expansion direction was to exist (and the more I 
think of this, the more I lean towards preferring this as the default), 
we could do the following.

I'm typing something:

#+begin_src org
foo·bar|
#+end_src

But then I decide to emphasize "bar", and only "bar".  I could go with 
`SPC M-o *' to get:

#+begin_src org
foo·*bar*·|
#+end_src

And be able to just keep on typing:

#+begin_src org
foo·*bar*·baz|
#+end_src

I wouldn't say this goes all the way to solve the "adding text around 
existing emphasis markers" problem.  But, as far as my scrutiny went, I 
do think it goes quite a stretch.  And it is quite simple, which should 
make for "intuitive" hopefully.

WDYT?

Best,
Gustavo.