Re: Contributing org-menu (using transient) to Orgmode?

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Jan Rehders <jan@sheijk.net> writes:

> I wrote a package called org-menu which uses transient to add a
> discoverable menu to Orgmode. It's a bit of a mix of a modal editing
> mode or speed commands and a Magit style hierarchical menu to find
> less frequently used commands.  I'd like to start a discussion here
> whether this plugin or similar functionality should be part of
> Orgmode before I block the name by getting it into nongnu elpa.

Thanks for reaching out!
Your package appears somewhat similar to
https://github.com/kickingvegas/casual-suite

> See https://github.com/sheijk/org-menu for some screen shots and
> description.
>
> Some questions:
> - should this or similar functionality be part of Orgmode? At least
>   the discoverability seems to be nice to have

Maybe. I am not 100% sure about generic menu functionality, but we do
have something similar for org-goto (help window) and org-speed-commands
(org-speed-command-help). Using transient instead of these ad-hoc help
menus could be beneficial. In particular, integration with
org-speed-commands can be very helpful.

More generally, we have previously discussed the idea of generic help
menu for major modes. See https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87a5oayblv.fsf@gmail.com/
I personally like the idea of some kind of help menu, but I have doubts
that transient is best-suited for the task. Ideally, help menus should
help with the existing key bindings rather than introducing brand
new. AFAIK, transient _always_ introduces new bindings.

> - what about overlap of the menu bar Orgmode already has. I think
>   this is a general question about transient vs. menu bars. Maybe a
>   generic solution to use transient to navigate the menu bar would
>   be more useful?

Menu bar can already be navigated from keyboard. Try M-x tmm-menubar.
Maybe transient could be utilized as a better UI for the same purpose,
but that's a topic for emacs-devel, not Org mailing list.

> - should something in Orgmode also have the modal editing part
>   integrated? For me that part is the most useful as I can use the
>   transient for nearly all editing tasks and the move into the tasks
>   for commands whose shortcuts I keep forgetting

org-speed-commands

> - would this need to be made more modular and extensible so it's
>   different parts could be moved into the respective Orgmode parts
>   (like column view features, etc.)?

I do not have a full picture of what you have in mind wrt integration
with Org upstream and about the structure of your package. So, I cannot
tell much on this.

wrt column view, I have doubts that transient can be very useful -
column view uses overlay keymaps while transients are global.

> I'd be open to contributing this to Emacs/Orgmode but I'd also be
> happy to keep maintaining it as a separate package. Only thing I
> would like to avoid would be to strip parts of it's functionality as
> then I'd need to fork my own package

This part is not fully clear to me. Do you mean that you are only
willing to upstream the whole package, but not parts of it?

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>