Re: Re: [ANN] Org-babel integrated into Org-mode

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Sébastien Vauban <wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com> wrote:

> Nick Dokos wrote:
> > Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> :-) Actually, in this specific area I had been thinking to removing or at
> >> least deprecating shell and elisp links, because the Org-babel way is much
> >> better and clearer to have that code in a block, rather than hiding it in
> >> the invisible part of of a link.
> >
> > Here is an early vote [1] for *not* removing shell and elisp links.
> > Deprecation/documentation/scary warnings is fine with me, but I do use these
> > kinds of links and I'd like to be able to continue using them.
> 
> For my own understanding of what more I could do that I don't even think of
> right now, *if not indiscreet/private*, could you give a couple of
> applications of such links?
> 

Hi Seb,

it's nothing spectacular: on the contrary, it's all the mundane things
that I have various scripts for (either shell or elisp), e.g. munge with
my jottings of the week and prepare a weekly report that is mailed to my
manager and also exported to HTML for posterity - that's an elisp
link. It's particularly things that I don't do often enough so I tend
to forget what they are called, what arguments they take, etc.

The links provide just enough documentation to jog my memory and a
convenient way to launch the thing. I have a lot of these in many files:
they tend to be very specific and so after a while the details slip away
(e.g. the org file that describes all I know about a particular bug,
might have a link to the bugzilla entry for the bug (an html link),
email links, file links to data and a link to start a test run - this
last is generally a shell link).

Before org, for shell scripts, I would list my ~/bin directory and try
to discern which of the many hundreds of scripts in there is the one
that I need, and assuming that I would find it, I would then read the
script to find what arguments it would need. Now, I visit an org file
(one of a handful, organized by topic), read the link description and
activate it.

IOW, it could all be done in org-babel, but I started these a long time
ago and I have accumulated so many of them, that converting would be a
pain. In addition, they are spread out all over the place, so I would
have to convert them one by one as I need them and there are so many
possible places for Murphy's law to intrude, that losing the capability
would be cause for serious concern for me. Hence the preemptive vote :-)

Cheers,
Nick