Re: Fwd: Mac OS Alias file links

[Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>]

Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Bastien,
>
> Thanks for letting me know it displays properly and email received. The
> URL works for me this morning too.
>
> On 2014-04-14 at 05:22, Bastien wrote:
>> Even for those who uses MacOSX, you should perhaps be more specific
>> on how Org-mode would store such links, then somebody might step up.
>
> Aliases are a type of links ("ln" on linux, "shortcut" on Windows
> "alias" on OS X (OS X of course also supports "ln")). The difference
> between an OS X alias and "ln" is that if the target is moved, the OS X
> alias still points to it, and double-clicking on an alias (or issuing
> the "open" command in a terminal) will open the target, wherever it
> is. I just checked in a VM and Windows Shortcuts also behave this way.
>
> Therefore, if in addition to "file:" there were an "alias:" option, Org
> could link to files that move. I think this is a powerful feature. I
> imagine "alias:" would be an option when I press C-cl, and a way to set
> it as the default when I press C-ucl.
>
> That is, links would be [[alias:foo][FileName]] where "foo" is a string
> version (hashed?) of the alias.
>
> In BibDesk, "foo" is ~1200 characters long, and according to the BibDesk
> documentation, that ~1200 characters is:
>
>> The Bdsk-File entries store Mac OS aliases, which contain a file ID
>> and absolute path. Bdsk-File entries also store a relative path, which
>> is used if the alias is broken.
>
> So it looks like an Alias can be hashed some way and stored as just a
> string. An example BibDesk entry in by BibTeX file looks like:
>
> @article{citekey,
> 	Author = {Someone},
> 	Journal = {Nature},
> 	Pages = {24--42},
> 	Title = {{A Paper}},
> 	Bdsk-File-1 = {YnBsa...etc for 1200 characters...}}
>
> Opening the file with C-o would involve un-hashing it, and then treating
> it the same way a "file:" is opened.
>
> I imagine Org would mostly store the links the same way it stores file
> links. The change would be that since the link is the alias (long ugly
> string), the description would be required, and perhaps default to
> /path/to/filename. Although since the whole point is that the /path/to/
> can change, perhaps the default name would just be filename.
>

What does emacs do when you C-x C-f an alias?

If it opens it properly (i.e. opens the target file) then why is
anything needed in org? It seems to me that a file: link should just
work.

If it does not, then maybe that's where the capability should be added.
Org seems to be the wrong place for it.

But note that everything I know about aliases, I learnt in the last five
minutes, so I could be way off the mark.

-- 
Nick