Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com> writes:

> Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>> Texinfo also comes with the added benefit of not requiring Emacs to edit
>>> or to translate into other formats.
>>
>> You can edit Org files outside Emacs. Say, in vim.
>> The point about exporting to other formats is valid.
>>
>> This last point also raises a question. Can Elisp interpreter and
>> libraries be factored out of Emacs to create a way to execute Elisp
>> programs without installing all the interactive parts of Emacs?
>
> Isn't Tim Cross(?) working on something like that -- ie. a parser for
> the Org language.  Once we have a solid parser, we can build a standard
> (set of?) backend(s) for much of Orgmode.

No. Ihor is the one working on the parser. 

I think Ihor's question about isolating the Elisp interpreter is about
options to make org mode work outside of Emacs. There are frequent
questions to the org list about making org available to other
editors/environments. However, the big problem is that much of the
really powerful featurs of org mode are intrinsically tied to elisp
functionality - for exmaple all the babel and backend export support.
While it is possible to write a parser in any language which would
enable basic org markup/formatting, that does not solve the problem of
executable blocks, babel/noweb and interaction with back end exporters
etc. 

This would be one example of where something like an elisp LSP module
would be useful. However, the idea of an elisp LSP module was
discouraged by a couple of people on this list over concerns that such a
module would enable non-free platforms to take advantage of elisp - a
fear which I think is overstated and which I think one person referred
to as "Jumping at shadows" 

The overall conclusion was that such a module would be considerable
amount of work. Some suggested you could use emacsclient to create
something which could be used in such a manner. However, I suspect that
if you go to the effort of installing and configuring emacs, you would
just use emacs.