Re: Differences between Org-Mode and Hyperbole

[Robert Weiner]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 7:18 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

Org mode is an example of how Emacs development went astray.

Emacs has many different modes and features.  Users should be able to
use them all either separately or (when meaningful) in combination.
The problem with Org mode is that many separate features have been
tied together inside it.  You can't use them separately.

It is a big ball of wax from what I have seen.  Here someone goes into extreme detail on his

setup and you can see what Richard is talking about:  http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html.

But a lot of people seem to be using it and like it, so we should try to understand the fundamental

things that the bulk of users like and then work to provide them in a clean manner.  One such feature

is the ability to write a note about an email message you are reading and have the note automatically

hyperlinked to the mail message for later reference.  Rapid time and task tracking are others.

The right way to integrate Org mode into Emacs would be to pry out
each of those subfeatures and integrate it individually -- so that a
user could use each of them either with or without Org mode.  It is
not too late for people to do this sort of thing, but it should have
been done before.

It may be that this issue applies to Hyperbole too.  If so, I hope
that we will handle Hyperbole better than we handled Org mode.

There is a bit of that but I suspect much less than with org-mode, as data abstraction is used throughout

with clean highlighting of public and private parts.  It was designed from the beginning to allow for other

user interfaces to be developed but since that never happened we have just extended the user interface

ourselves to encompass its functionality.  The various tools (the Koutliner, the Rolo and HyControl) could

all be used separately if needed with small amounts of work; using them as part of Hyperbole just makes

them more convenient.

For instance, Emacs should have a calendar which does not depend on
Hyperbole or BBDB or Org mode (but can work well with any of them).

Calendar and diary mode used to be this way.  Is that not the case any more?

So clean abstractions, explicit programming where one can follow the code rather than having much of the

source be internally generated via macros, and consistent user interfaces should be a goal, I would think.

Bob