Re: [RFC] Org Minor Mode?

[Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Bastien,

> Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The real value and innovation of a true
>> org-minor-mode would be to introduce Org's intelligent headlines and all
>> the related functionality into the world of outcommented text in
>> programming modes.
>
> Yes.  We could have `orgstruct-comment-prefix-regexp' along with
> `orgstruct-heading-prefix-regexp'.  I'll check this, thanks for
> the idea!

As long as there are hardcoded regexp searches all over the place in
org.el, org-agenda.el, orgtbl.el, and to a minor extends almost all
other Org libraries, I don't think just another outline-regexp can do
the trick - the called functions will fail when trying to match

,--------
| "^foo$"
`--------

but looking at

,---------------------------------------------------------------
| "^<<comment-starter-syntax>>foo<<maybe-comment-end-syntax>>$"
`---------------------------------------------------------------

Furthermore calling Org functions modifies the buffer, sometimes
inserting new lines, sometimes not. An Org minor-mode would need to
detect all newly inserted lines after a command call and outcomment them
with the programming major-mode's comment syntax. 

I already found a way to do that using external calls to diff, its
implemented in omm.el (needs to be debugged though, I stopped working on
it because it seemed the idea of an Org Minor Mode was a bit unpopular). 

In summary, its about:

 1. generalize the regexp constants and vars (allow for comment-syntax,
 when org-minor-mode)

 2. deal with hardcoded regexp-snippets in functions (my proposoal:
 replace "^" with org-BOL, "$" with org-EOL, "\\*" with org-STAR)

 3. outcomment new lines after calls to Org commands. 

All the other stuff should be already there in orgstruct and outshine. 

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten