Future reliance on Emacs?
Bearcat
Thank you for this great plug-in!! It's just what i was looking for to
cast off the shackles of Tomboy (there's a conversion script that i
found here in case anyone can use it (
https://github.com/StAlphonsos/scriptologie/blob/develop/scripts/tomboy2org.pl
).
Do you have any plans to incorporate the export and printing functions
to get rid of the optional dependency on emacs?
Bearcat
Herbert Sitz
> Herb,
>
> Thank you for this great plug-in!! It's just what i was looking for to
> cast off the shackles of Tomboy (there's a conversion script that i
> found here in case anyone can use it (
> https://github.com/StAlphonsos/scriptologie/blob/develop/scripts/tomboy2org.pl
> ).
Bearcat -- Great, glad it's working for you. It's definitely rough
around some edges but I'm trying to improve things.
>
> Do you have any plans to incorporate the export and printing functions
> to get rid of the optional dependency on emacs?
>
No, VimOrganizer will always depend on Emacs/Orgmode for the export
functions. This might at first seem like a downside; I thought so
myself originally. But I've come to see it more as a very important
feature. There are a number of reasons for thinking this:
1. Exporting org format files is actually a hugely complicated task.
It might not seem so if all you do is use simple outlines, but Orgmode
is much more than that, and all of the features are supported in its
export.
2. Orgmode has a large user community and is actively developed,
_very_ actively developed. Using an Emacs server to access Orgmode
functions means all of the development in Orgmode's export is
instantaneously available in VimOrganizer at zero cost.
3. You have the entire Orgmode community (at
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmodegmane ) to help with export
and other issues. Since export codebase is the same, issues with
export in VimOrganizer can be leveraged off of Orgmode's help
community.
4. It helps to not think of Vim and Emacs as being simply editor
alternatives. You're probably aware that Emacs has jokingly been
called a "great operating system that lacks only a decent editor". In
context of Vim/VimOrganizer it's best to think of Vim as using Emacs
as an application server, rather than an editor. In fact, this is
exactly what's happening.
5. VimOrganizer uses Emacs/Orgmode for more than just export. Orgmode
has important features like "dynamic blocks" and org-babel (which
allows running embedded code from twenty or so different languages).
These features in VimOrganizer also depend on Emacs server and benefit
from Orgmode development.
So in my mind it doesn't make sense to allocate any of the time I
spend on VimOrganizer to a native Vim export. I realize there is a
set of users who might like to export simple outlines without needing
to set up the Emacs server. But I would encourage them to set up the
Emacs server. It's not hard to set up and it opens up a rich range of
functionality that leverages off development of Orgmode.
For the very simplest outlines it's probably not hard to write a
native Vim export so something like Markdown format. But that would
still need to be processed to html or LaTex/pdf by an external
program, so I don't see much benefit to the Vim-native part of things.
Plus it gets complicated quickly as you get beyond the simplest
outlines.
Hope that helps,
Herb
Herbert Sitz
>
> 3. You have the entire Orgmode community (at
> http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmodegmane ) to help with export
>
That link should actually be:
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode
That's an active newsgroup with around 40 or 50 messages per day.
Reading through a bit of that newsgroup and also looking through the
Org manual ( http://orgmode.org/manual/index.html ) will give some
idea of just how complex Orgmode is. . . . It's not just a simple
outiner.
v