Re: Org Writer's room

[Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
> On 12/06/12 20:09 PM, Matt Price wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>>> Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Alan L Tyree <alantyree@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On 06/12/12 11:22, Rasmus wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Andrew Hyatt <ahyatt@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This sounds like an interesting project.  My advice is to make a few
>>>>>>> screenshots that give people an idea what you are working towards.
>>>>>>> Of course, they could be completely fake, but it would be helpful to
>>>>>>> understand for people like me who haven't used Scrivener.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I would also like to see this.  It sounds nice when I read your
>>>>>> description, but I still don't fully appreciate the idea.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> –Rasmus
>>>>>>
>>>>> I'm also very interested. I haven't used Scrivener -- what features do you
>>>>> see as making org a *way* better writing environment?
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>>> To start with I would like to just replicate this window structure,
>>>> because it keeps you focused on writing, while having the larger
>>>> structure available if you feel the need to flit around a bit.  The
>>>> third screenshot shows a semi-fake, still very primitive version of
>>>> what I'd like to have.  (I haven't figured out a good way to do the
>>>> metadata yet).
>>>
>>> I *really* like the idea of having a right-hand pane available showing
>>> properties around the current point -- it could include properties from
>>> the PROPERTIES drawer, from the structure returned by
>>> `org-element-property', text properties, and maybe properties of the
>>> current headline parent. I'm sort of envisioning what you get from the
>>> "inspect element" command in Firefox.
>>>
>>> For the left-hand pane, org-toc and org-panel in the contrib directory
>>> (or even the org-goto interface) might provide some inspiration.
>>>
>>> Ugh, sounds like a lot of work.
>>>
>> those are 3 powerful tools I hadn't used before.  org-toc not working
>> for me at the moment though, there might be something wrong with my
>> .emacs setup...
>
> Yeah, some of that's out of date. Actually, since Org looks like it will
> be slowly migrating over to a basis on org elements, that's probably a
> good direction to look. `org-element-parse-buffer' will return a data
> structure for the current buffer that would be ideal for creating a tree
> visualization.

hmm, just looked at the output of that command and the data structures
look like:

(headline (:raw-value "The Function of Copyright" :begin 489 :end 610
:pre-blank 0 :hiddenp outline :contents-begin 517 ...) (section
(:begin 517 :end 610 :contents-begin 517 :contents-end 610 :post-blank
0 :parent #1)))

Those integers are char numbers in the buffer -- would this list then
have to be updated for every character stroke?  Hmm, I also can pretty
much see how to get each :raw-value and turn it into text that's
presented in a buffer... but I don't understand how to associate that
text with the existing headline in an org file.  Speedbar seems like a
much easier option, but while the org-mode parser is nowworking for
me(yay!) I can't make the same-frame package work (sr-speedbar)!  Gosh
darn it!

ANyway,  thanks eveyrone, I'm going to keep needing help on this so if
you have more suggestions please keep them coming..

matt