Re: Outline mode

[John J Foerch <jjfoerch@earthlink.net>]

"Davis Herring" <herring@lanl.gov> writes:
>
> There's nothing preventing them from going there; with the "new" C-e they
> just do C-n C-b to go to that (visible) newline.  With the
> front-advance/rear-advance overlays, typing before that last newline will
> add to the (invisible) body invisibly, as it should.
>
> If (with all my proposals) you go to the end of the header (via C-e or
> whatever else that doesn't put you -past- the invisible newline that ends
> it), you are then truly on the header and can edit however you like. 
> Pressing C-b once would put you before the last normal character in the
> heading (the 'y' of "body" in the example), and self-inserting would add
> visible characters immediately after that character.  So (unless you do
> want to insert in the middle of the header) no arrowing is required, and
> no text is invisible that shouldn't be.
>
> I know nothing about org-mode, but again, there are no funny surprises,
> aside from the bit where the cursor is rendered after the ellipsis. 
> You're still "conceptually" in front of the ellipsis, in that inserted
> text appears in front of it and one C-b moves you away from the ellipsis
> entirely.  And I think that derived modes should be able to tell (unless
> they're being too clever) that you're on the header: you are after all
> before the header's newline.
>
> Part of the reason I am attempting to prove the utility of the
> C-e/advancing-overlay solution is that I fear such a feature would be
> prohibitively expensive/complex.
>
> Davis
>

Hi Davis,

Making the overlay rear-advance and front-advance sounds like a good
thing to do because that will solve some of the problem of the
inconsistency of inserting characters at the end of the header.

I still would not change any movement commands though.  If I came
across a situation where I could move point to some character by
moving backwards, but not forward, I would find that to be very
strange and would report it as a bug.  I would rather leave the quirk
in outline-mode and have some hope that I or someone else would figure
out how to add the feature to the ellipsis mechanism that I described.
Also, recall that I did implement a separate ellipsis mechanism in
elisp in the patch I posted, and I'm happy to keep using that until
the ellipsis code in emacs' C code can provide the behavior.

--John