Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Visuwesh <visuweshm@gmail.com> writes:

> [புதன் ஜூன் 08, 2022] Tim Cross wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> - Increasing org's use of built-in Emacs capabilities rather than using
>>   org specific implementations. For example, adopting transient instead
>>   of an org implemented module which replicates similar functionality. 
>
> Where can I read more about this?  I see it being mentioned a few times
> in the org-mode mailing list, and in the matrix room.  Is the plan to
> completely remove the org-mks interface and replace it with transient
> without having an option to use the former?  I find org-mks perfectly
> fine to use and would be sad if it was replaced with transient.
> Transient needs time to get used to, and the default settings is quite
> un-Emacsy; I'm not too excited about configuring yet another package
> that has a hard-to-understand manual TBH.


The specifics of what is planned are still being worked out. Initially,
the likely initial candidate for change will be to the export menu.
Unless you have extensive low level customisation, it should not be a
change which has significant impact on users. In fact, maintaining
backwards compatibility and consistency for end users is important to
the org developers. It is also quite possible that after an initial
investigation, it may be decided transient is not a good option for org
mode or perhaps it will be a good option once additonal functionality or
enhancements are added. Right now, all that has been agreed is that it
would be worthwhile looking at it to see if it can be of benefit in
helping to reduce org maintenance overheads and/or increase org's
consistency with other emacs packages. 

What will determine what remains and what choices are available will
depend on what involvement people have in the development and what will
be maintainable. There are a number of areas in org mode where
functionality has been implemented that is 80+% equivalent to
functionality which exists or has been added to core emacs. Having this
duplication of effort is adding to the burden of maintenance, which is
already significant. In general, org maintainers keep an eye on what is
being added/expanded in Emacs core and when things are added, like
transient mode, they are assessed to see if adopting that functionality
would reduce the org maintenance load and improve org's consistency
withi the rest of Emacs. At this stage, transient has been added as
something to look at in the backlog. When this task makes if off the
backlog, the typical process would be for it to be discussed on the org
devel list, for initial implementations to be done either in its own
branch (if considered a significantly large enough change) or on the
development branch otherwise and people will be asked to try it out. 

So, if your interested in this area, the first thing would be to get on
the org devel mail list. Anyone who is particularly keen to see such
things added might also initiate discussions and development in their
own branch, which could then be added in as a PR. However, like Emacs,
any significant development work on org mode also requires FSF copyright
assignment. 

At this specific point in time, the main focus with org has been on
stability, performance improvements, especially for large org files with
many babel blocks and sections and improvements to the org syntax and provision of an
org parser,  

In particular, I think the work being done by Ihor on folding and
the org parser will have huge benefits. In addition to making the code
base easier to maintain and improving performance, it will help reduce
org's current dependency on complicated and difficult to maintain
regular expressions in the font-locking layer. This should improve
performance and reduce errors or unexpected results that sometimes occur
because of regexp errors etc and reduce time spent by maintainers in
tracking down such errors and maintenance of those complex regexps.