Re: Differences between Org-Mode and Hyperbole

[Robert Weiner <rsw@gnu.org>]

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On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 7:18 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> Org mode is an example of how Emacs development went astray.
>
> Emacs has many different modes and features.  Users should be able to
> use them all either separately or (when meaningful) in combination.
> The problem with Org mode is that many separate features have been
> tied together inside it.  You can't use them separately.
>

It is a big ball of wax from what I have seen.  Here someone goes into
extreme detail on his
setup and you can see what Richard is talking about:
http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html.

But a lot of people seem to be using it and like it, so we should try to
understand the fundamental
things that the bulk of users like and then work to provide them in a clean
manner.  One such feature
is the ability to write a note about an email message you are reading and
have the note automatically
hyperlinked to the mail message for later reference.  Rapid time and task
tracking are others.

>
> The right way to integrate Org mode into Emacs would be to pry out
> each of those subfeatures and integrate it individually -- so that a
> user could use each of them either with or without Org mode.  It is
> not too late for people to do this sort of thing, but it should have
> been done before.
>
> It may be that this issue applies to Hyperbole too.  If so, I hope
> that we will handle Hyperbole better than we handled Org mode.
>

There is a bit of that but I suspect much less than with org-mode, as data
abstraction is used throughout
with clean highlighting of public and private parts.  It was designed from
the beginning to allow for other
user interfaces to be developed but since that never happened we have just
extended the user interface
ourselves to encompass its functionality.  The various tools (the
Koutliner, the Rolo and HyControl) could
all be used separately if needed with small amounts of work; using them as
part of Hyperbole just makes
them more convenient.

For instance, Emacs should have a calendar which does not depend on
> Hyperbole or BBDB or Org mode (but can work well with any of them).
>

Calendar and diary mode used to be this way.  Is that not the case any more?

So clean abstractions, explicit programming where one can follow the code
rather than having much of the
source be internally generated via macros, and consistent user interfaces
should be a goal, I would think.

Bob

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