Re: Formal description of Org files

[Samuel Loury <konubinix@gmail.com>]

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Hi,
Gustav Wikström <gustav.erik@gmail.com> writes:

>> Just curious: what is it you wish to do in a mobile environment.  I have
>> everything I need with MobileOrg and running full emacs + org on an
>> OpenPandora.  Obviously, your needs may be different than mine.
>>
>> (email composed on train offline on my OpenPandora in Emacs with gnus ;-)
>>
>> --
>> : Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 24.3.1, Org release_8.3beta-372-gdd70cf
>
> My wish is to be able to do mostly everything related to
> task-tracking, scheduling, working with references and so on. General
> GTD stuff. OpenPandora sounds neat, except it's not quite the standard
> tool available out there ;-) And a general idea of Emacs in your
> pocket is nice, except it's not really possible without a different UI
> than the keyboard. So; what way forward with GTD in Emacs Org-mode
> then, while still having the wish of it to be more accessible?
>
> Thus the idea of a more formal (and parsable) grammar in a
> standardized format. My hope is that it will make Org-mode more
> general than it already is. As I said already; Org-mode to me is more
> than Emacs. To think BIG, Org-mode grammar could be a standard for PIM
> or GTD related software. To think a bit less big, it might help
> developers create software with non-Emacs tools. By using the formal
> grammar to work with Org-mode source documents in more accessible
> ways. Maybe with UI's available through mobile phones or tablets (and
> without the use of special schedules of read/write in Emacs to keep
> the mobile system synced; MobileOrg).
This sounds like a good idea. And since there are a lot of parsers in
other languages recognizing a subset of org mode syntax, other people
like this idea too.

I think a difficulty with that solution is that it won't capture the
heavy customization the user can make on org-mode using hooks or
customizing variables.

Having a real emacs in the pocket would provide org-mode along with the
customization. Nevertheless, as you stated, emacs is not really user
friendly when you don't have a keyboard at hand.

For that reason, I think that as well as embedding emacs into the phone,
we could provide a UI communicating with it using an IPC mechanism.

This way, we would have the solution with more to gain (a functional
org-mode as well as the customization) and less to write (only the
needed UI code). I already tried using epc to perform a two way
communication between a python shell and emacs. I talked about this in
another thread¹.

What do you think of this approach?

¹ http://mid.gmane.org/87iokv4659.fsf@gmail.com
-- 
Konubinix
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