Re: Marking/highlighting text temporarily

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Eric Abrahamsen writes:

> Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:
>
>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>>
>>> Would this be eligible?
>>
>> Not that my .02€ are worth much, but I think the idea of inline notes is
>> good, but I don't think it should be done using links.  See e.g. the
>> discussion on citation which introduced a [cite:⋯] command.  A [comment:⋯]
>> command would also IMO make much more sense than [[comment:X][Y]] as was
>> allowed last time I read your patch (in the weekend, I think).
>
> Wow, I just went back and looked at the cite thread. That was
> bewildering. I don't see a direct connection here, though -- cite was
> needed for very specific academic purposes, with very clearly-defined
> needs. Comment is much floppier: good for anything from notes-to-self,
> to notes-to-editor, to notes-to-no-one.
>
> *None* of the complexity is in the format itself: if you unloaded
> org-comment, the comment links would be perfectly human-readable. All of
> the complexity is in helper functions for manipulating them. I suppose
> it would be possible to define some non-link syntax for them, but why do
> that when the link syntax works perfectly well?

The only reason I can see (coming from someone who uses links liberally
for other purposes ;) is just to avoid the hacks required to get extra
functionality, e.g. as you alluded to applying different faces, storing
additional information (author, timestamp, etc...), avoiding a need to
add a link type-checking for collecting comments (although, this is not
a very difficult step).

On the link side, they work perfectly well for the simplest kind of
comment, and because of that, there is a working prototype already. But,
I think extending it beyond this will require the hackery described
above. I don't have a sense if it is more work than defining a new
syntax, or the long term maintenance costs of that approach. For me, it
is work I already know how to do. I admit though, that does not mean it
is better than a new syntax ;)

Maybe a study of the cite syntax code would clarify the differences. Can
anyone point me to a code repository where we could read that code?

>
>> On inclusion in contrib I think you can put anything org-ish there.  It's
>> better if the copyright is cleared in case we want to make it part of
>> core, but it's not necessary.  There's little difference between core and
>> contrib as neither are included in Emacs and thus are hard to rely on.
>>
>> Since you use cl-lib (last I checked) it could not be part of Org before
>> 8.4.
>
> Ah, that's a good point. cl-lib isn't necessary, just convenient, and
> could be removed.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric

--
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu