About org mode

[Edward K. Ream]

I finished watching this superb video about org-mode earlier today.  I took copious notes.

It has inspired many thoughts, and will continue to do so. I expect this conversation to be long lasting and fruitful.  Some brief first thoughts:

1. The demo looked off the cuff. Each topic had its own org-mode "page" containing the script for that page. It looks like Camtasia did the post production. This is a perfectly reasonable, perhaps superior, alternative to totally controlled demos using demo-it.el or demo.py.

2. After the first few minutes, the presentation had almost nothing to do with outlines!

3. The demo shows that Leo must have better rendering in the body pane, not a separate rendering pane.

4. Imo, the real difference between Leo and Emacs lies differing approaches to multiple buffers and screen real estate. Both ways have pluses and minuses.  Discussing the nuances should be fascinating.

5. Leo can (and will) soon have everything that org-mode has. Otoh, that will likely not be enough to cause an exodus from Emacs to Leo.  Still, Leo has features that org-mode will likely never have. It reminds me of the song, Anything you can do, I can do better.

More to come later.

Edward

[jkn]

Hi Edward

FWIW (I haven't watched the whole video yet), the early parts of this reminded me a lot of the 'Origami' Editor for the Transputer Development System (TDS)

The Tab/Alt-TAB action of Origami to enter/leave 'integrated' outlines was terribly fast and intuitive.

Origami is history these days but it might still be worth a play for insight. I ill try to find a link to a binary which works on recent systems.

    Regards
    Jon N

[Largo84]

I would love to be able to do most of what he demonstrated in that video with Leo and org-mode. Maybe I can now, but just haven't figured out how yet. Great stuff!

BTW, search the Leo web site documentation for `org-mode` and nothing comes up. However, search for `org mode' and several results come up. Very weird...

Rob..........

[Israel Hands]

Hi EKR - I am a very lightweight user of both Leo and org-mode - for me the killer dimension of org-mode is the Agenda view with the integrated diary and the ability of org-mode to throw up reminder dialogues. For me at least todo lists tend to be dead letter unless they reach out to me.  The ability to hold todo items and diary items together is the gold and means EMACS is the first thing I run - just before Leo.  

While we are on the topic of what keeps us in different places Auctex is probably the other thing or was the other thing that kept me on Emacs however I now use Scrivener MMD compiled to Latex - I feel bad about this. Scrivener has lots of nice features but I know that Leo would be better it's just a matter of the set up learning curve.  A really easy Latex set up would be another winner. 

IH

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, February 10, 2017 at 4:21:20 PM UTC-6, Edward K. Ream wrote:

> Leo [must] have everything that org-mode has.

Leo's to-do list now contains the following:

- Steal everything useful from org mode:
    - Agenda.
    - Text drawers replace uA's.
    - Rendering of Latex, etc. in Leo's body pane.
    - Better support for shell console & scripts.
    - Better support for make, C, C++, Java, etc.

- Support .org files and .org.leo files.

The results will be better, because of Leo's API, DOM and python language. Otoh, org mode is now entrenched. Leo won't change that. To keep Leo viable it must be easy to convert between Leo outlines and org mode outlines.

Edward

[Arjan]

This sounds great! I would add two further desiderata based on orgmode's capabilities (though I don't know if they are feasible).

1. Support for tabular data inside the body pane. In orgmode capturing some tabular data is as easy as writing "| column a | column b |" etc.; you can navigate columns with tab, columns adapt their width to the content, and it is structure-aware, e.g. you can export tables to CSV/Excel. Perhaps something like "@language csv" (or tab-separated @language tsv) could be Leo's answer?

2. In OrgMode, outline structure and content are in the same pane. You can expand all hierarchies and directly see and work on all the text in context (i.e. see the contents of preceding and following headings). I've started using Leo for writing and as information-manager, but this is really the biggest thing holding me back to use it for everything. Leo's strength derives from the outline capabilities, so you have to put small units of information in nodes to benefit from that, and that means you can only see one small piece of information at a time **while working on the text / information**.

So, what would be great is to be able to mark e.g. a chapter or section node with an option "include all child nodes in the chapter's body pane in outline order", with the ability to edit the child nodes' contents directly. Probably far-fetched, but I can dream, right? ;)

All best,

Arjan

[john lunzer]

1. Agree, auto-formatting tabular data in Org-mode is one of the central features.

2. I will go back to my "continuous edit pane" idea. I think if you really want to recreate Org-mode and make it attractive to those familiar with Org-mode there must be a "continuous edit pane" mode for Leo.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Saturday, February 11, 2017 at 4:26:44 PM UTC-6, Israel Hands wrote:

> for me the killer dimension of org-mode is the Agenda view

Leo must have an agenda plugin, possibly based on Terry's todo plugin.

>Auctex...kept me on Emacs.

Leo must have an easy way of rendering Latex and other symbols in the body pane.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thursday, February 16, 2017 at 11:08:49 AM UTC-6, Arjan wrote:

...two further desiderata based on org mode's capabilities

1. Support for tabular data inside the body pane.

A new table.py plugin will do this.

2. In OrgMode, outline structure and content are in the same pane.

This is really the key design difference between Leo and emacs/org-mode. I have been meaning to write about it. Here are my thoughts:

There are obvious advantages to org mode's operation. Behind the scenes, there is only one pane/widget/window, whatever you want to call it.

Would I use the org mode way if I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now about the difficulties involved? Hard to say, but I like the separation of outline view and body pane. In Leo, the body pane is always visible, and I think that's important.

Otoh, an everything-in-one pane design works very well with Emacs's "windowing" system. It would be foolish to criticize it much.
 

Leo's strength derives from the outline capabilities, so you have to put small units of information in nodes to benefit from that, and that means you can only see one small piece of information at a time **while working on the text / information**.

Interesting.  I never thought of that benefit to the org mode way.
 

So, what would be great is to be able to mark e.g. a chapter or section node with an option "include all child nodes in the chapter's body pane in outline order", with the ability to edit the child nodes' contents directly. Probably far-fetched, but I can dream, right? ;)

Something like that has been proposed before. I ignored it then, and I don't like your specific proposal much.  But a more general solution is interesting, namely one-pane operation, just like org mode. Visually, this would be a radical departure for Leo. There would also be large adjustments behind the scenes. But everything is possible, given enough effort...

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Edward K. Ream <edre...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> So, what would be great is to be able to mark e.g. a chapter or section node with a

​​

n option "include all child nodes in the chapter's body pane in outline order", with the ability to edit the child nodes' contents directly.

​Suppose Leo supported a V2 outline pane that shows

​ ​

zero or more body panes, embedded (somehow!) in the Qt outline.

Behind the scenes, almost everything would remain the same:

- Exactly one node, c.p, is the selected node.
- Exactly one body pane, c.frame.body, is selected.

​Obviously, this would be a major project, but it's conceivable.

Edward

[Arjan]

​Suppose Leo supported a V2 outline pane that shows

​ ​

zero or more body panes, embedded (somehow!) in the Qt outline.

That sounds  very interesting. In that case, would the regular body pane be hidden for this mode of operation?

[Edward K. Ream]

​That's the idea, yes.  I may play around with this in a new plugin, but that's for later.

Edward