On Sun, Jul 3, 2016, 6:37 PM Richard Stallman <
rms@gnu.org> wrote:
The usual Emacs way of selecting a command set for a specific job is
to specify a major mode. Using a line that says "TODO" as to select a
command set seems inconsistent. Why not make this a major mode?
The beauty is that only that specific line has to contain the TODO information. The whole buffer is not a TODO list. If you think along those lines, org-mode has made it possible to have different major mode like behaviors in the same buffer.
A single TODO headline could have the following:
- Different face for displaying and different export style based on the headline level of that TODO line.
- Under those TODO headlines, you can have regular or check-list style children TODO headlines.
- Some of those could have just regular paragraphs or numbered/plain/definition lists or source blocks or quotation blocks or ..... which should behave in display/export as per the org mode convention.
- The TODO headlines can have a "property block" which can contain a wide range of meta properties to be used during export, tangling, etc.
- They can have internal/external links, footnotes, etc.
This is barely skimming everything that one can have in a single headline in the same org buffer. Unless we have a way in the core to support multiple major modes in a single buffer, we cannot break out hundreds of different properties that org mode applies on the same buffer into individual major modes.
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