Re: [O] [PATCH] org.el: Preserve indentation of manually indented lines in example blocks.

[Valentin Wüstholz]

Hi Nicolas,

thanks for the quick response.


On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> wrote:
> Valentin Wüstholz <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Colons are great for short snippets. However, blocks are far more
>> convenient for longer passages.
>
> That's certainly true, but I fail to see an use case for such long
> passages. May I know what you do have in mind?


Sure. At least four use cases come to my mind for this: (a) literal
console output, (b) blocks of pseudo code (can't really use SRC blocks
since there is no actual language for this), (c) blocks of source code
in experimental or little known programming languages (ditto), and (d)
sketches of mathematical proofs or computations where you don't want
to mess with LaTeX typesetting (yet). More generally, every long
passage where you would like indentation to be treated literally (not
only by an exporter, but also by the automatic indenter).


>> What potential hassle were you thinking of?
>
> Being left with no more literal markup automatically indented. It's not
> that your idea is bad, but there could be users appreciating the current
> feature.


I certainly thought about existing users, which is why by default
lines are is still indented like before. If you care about automatic
indentation, your example blocks are already indented like the
delimiters and the new behaviour keeps it just like that. If you
previously chose to indent you blocks differently, the new behaviour
will respect that decision by not messing with your indentation.


> Perhaps this could be applied to verse blocks instead.


As far as I recall verse blocks are treated somewhat differently from
example blocks by the exporter (e.g. verse vs verbatim in LaTeX).
Initially, I thought about allowing no specific language in SRC
blocks. However, this seems somewhat counterintuitive to me.

Best regards,

Valentin