Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Po Lu]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Could you please quantify much slower?

Making the Org manual takes about 27 seconds on my system:

  GEN      org.texi
  GEN      ../../info/org.info

real    0m27.210s
user    0m25.567s
sys     0m0.783s

Which is longer than it takes for the entire (much more massive) Emacs
Lisp reference manual:

  GEN      ../../info/elisp.info

real    0m24.561s
user    0m23.660s
sys     0m0.515s

And generating the .info file from the Org manual texinfo source takes
only:

  GEN      ../../info/org.info

real    0m5.381s
user    0m5.109s
sys     0m0.141s

So it's clear that the org to texinfo export takes most of the time.

> I believe that if we want to be serious about using Org for
> documentation more widely, we should first identify which particular
> aspects of Org are beneficial for documentation and which particular
> aspects are available in other documentation generators and must be then
> provided by Org (if not yet available).

I don't see why we should be serious about using Org for our
documentation, when most people already know texinfo and are quite happy
with it.

> This is not true. Org mode supports #+include: directives to incorporate
> multiple smaller files into one larger file.

That's nice, but why isn't the Org manual itself structured that way?

> You can edit Org files outside Emacs. Say, in vim.

But does it work very well?

> This last point also raises a question. Can Elisp interpreter and
> libraries be factored out of Emacs to create a way to execute Elisp
> programs without installing all the interactive parts of Emacs?

Probably not without a lot of work.