Re: Marking/highlighting text temporarily

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> I'm copying Nicolas -- Nicolas, is there a process for inclusion in
>> contrib? Would this be eligible? I'll just stick it in Elpa,
>> otherwise.
>
> Any package is eligible.
>
> However, contrib/ is from pre-"package.el" days. Nowadays, I tend to
> think it should be used only as an incubator for libraries meant to be
> moved into core. Other libraries should be packaged in ELPA.
>
> I admit I didn't read the thread carefully. IIUC, it seems to be an
> annotation mechanism. If I'm correct, I think it belongs to the first
> category.

Yup, "annotation mechanism" is about right. Just to be clear, you think
it fits into the category of incubation-prior-to-core?

If anyone thinks that this mechanism warrants actual new Org syntax, I'd
be happy to work on implementing that. But to be honest, I think it sits
pretty comfortably on top of what's already available. The only slight
awkwardness comes when you'd like a different face for the annotation
links (currently solved with John Kitchin's hi-lock trick), and the fact
that the link export routines don't have access to the exportation
info/plist channels (ie, when exporting an annotation link to ODT, I'd
like to be able to give the annotation an "author" element, but as far
as I know I can't get access to that). These aren't major flaws.

All that said, I do think this is an important feature that fills a bit
of gap in Org. TODOs are fundamental, but they are discrete entities.
Those of us who use Org for authoring could use a method of decorating
spans of text with pertinent information. As org-comment stands now, the
tabular list buffer serves as a pseudo Agenda for text comments: I have
been using it, for example, as a way of keeping track of translation
problems that I need to resolve.

I'll admit I have dreamed of a syntax that looks like: [[body text to
annotate][TODO:Look this up on the internet:@work]]. The thought of
plugging that in to the existing Agenda machine is exhausting even to
contemplate, though.

I know we've got inlinetodos. They bug me, though: the absurd number of
stars (even if they are invisible), and the fact that you're still not
really attaching the TODO to specific text, which is what I want. I know
these aren't reasonable objections, but still.

Now I wish we'd named it org-annotate.

I'm done,
Eric