org-open-at-point while on "normal" text

[Rainer Dunker <rainer.dunker@mailbox.org>]

Hello All,

typing C-c C-o to follow a link while point is on "normal" text instead of a link, this results in error "no link found"; okay.

Recently there was an Org Mode upgrade from version 9.4.4 to 9.6.6 on my machine, and since then, C-c C-o on "normal" text behaves differently: Instead of raising the no link error, it opens the "Select link to open" menu. As I understand, this behaviour should occur when point is on the section's headline, but not when it's just somewhere within the section.

I tracked this down to a changed behaviour of the org-element-at-point function. Suppose I have a buffer in Org Mode containing these two lines:

   * headline
   text

If I place point within the word "text" and evaluate the expression ...

(org-element-property :parent (org-element-property :parent (org-element-at-point)))

... this results in "(headline (:raw-value "headline" :begin 1 ...", apparently meaning that I just navigated the document structure tree from the text paragraph up to the section headline.

Doing the same test on another machine with Org Mode 9.4.4, the expression results in nil. And as far as I understand, this is the expected behaviour: Starting with (org-element-at-point) and following the chain of parent relations in the structure tree should not reach the headline. I found this explanation in both the Org Element API reference in section 1.1 ...

https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-element-api.html#local

... as well as in this mailing list post:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2020-02/msg00226.html

I also noticed that, between these two Org Mode versions, the org-element-at-point function has been completely rewritten. Now my question is: Is the changed behaviour--and, as a consequence, also that of org-open-at-point--intended or rather a bug?

Regards,

Rainer Dunker