Re: Refiling list items

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

> I guess this really amounts to the first time I've ever been convinced
> that "treating list items like headlines" would be useful to me. At
> least, it feels like list items might benefit from being a proper
> subset of headlines. I don't remember what the disadvantages of such a
> move would be, but I suspect there's a lot of tacit knowledge in the
> codebase already.

From my point of view, lists cannot be a subset of headlines. Indeed,
headlines are global structural elements, whereas items are local
structural elements. In other words, moving an item outside of its
scope, which is the list it belongs, will remove any structural meaning
it has.

For example, what is the point of moving an un-ordered item into an
ordered list, or, worse, an un-ordered item into a description list?
Sure, the item being moved and the destination list may share the same
structure, but it's only a part of the equation.

Also, we can imagine the following situation, where a section holds
a description list and an un-ordered one. If one wants to move an
un-ordered item there, should it be moved into the logical, but
mismatched, first description list, or into the un-ordered one?

My point is that outside of its list, an item is just plain text.

Thus, why not take that into account? Instead of creating a magical
function to refile items anywhere, let's just extend `org-refile' to
work on a region of text which is not a sub-tree.

At the moment, org-refile understands the concept of region, but checks
if that region holds a sub-tree. What about removing that check, and
adapt the code to text without trees? It will then be the user's problem
if he wants to match apples and oranges. Furthermore, as a side effect,
refiling an item would simply mean selecting it and using refile
interface.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou