Re: [O] ANN: org-ql agenda block support

[Mikhail Skorzhinskii]

Great overview, thanks a lot.

So I give it a try and completely fell in love. On my data set it is
visibly faster then org-agenda. I also wrote a lot of code around
org-agenda over the years to support my sometimes awkward needs. And now
I just threw all this ugly code away!

That was very emotional moment for me, very good job, kind sir.

Adam Porter <address@hidden> writes:

 > Mikhail Skorzhinskii <address@hidden> writes:
 >
 > > Adam Porter <address@hidden> writes:
 > >  > However, the org-ql-block version runs in about 1/5th the time (0.7
 > >  > seconds compared to 3.45 seconds on my collection of org-agenda-files).
 > >
 > > For some reason I thought that on average org-ql package is working
 > > slower then native org-agenda searches. Probably because there are more
 > > control and interface is much more simpler and cleaner and nothing
 > > comes free of charge. That sort of thing. :-)
 >
 > Well, it might also be because it used to be generally slower, and I
 > tried to be clear about that whenever I mentioned it.  :)  But I've
 > applied a lot of optimizations to it over the past few months, so it's
 > generally pretty fast now, sometimes much faster.  It's hard to make a
 > direct comparison in some cases, depending on the complexity of the
 > query.  I plan to continue optimizing it as I'm able, so hopefully it
 > will continue improving.
 >
 > > I am really glad that I was mistaken. Care to drop a few thoughts on why
 > > this is the case? This is applicable only for ql-block or other org-ql
 > > functions are a bit faster too?
 >
 > Well, it's a completely different implementation.  It has two main
 > features which attempt to make it fast: it uses regexp searches across
 > buffers as much as possible, similar to org-agenda.el but in a more
 > flexible way (though there's still room for improvement here, especially
 > with complex queries); and it caches results keyed on the query, buffer,
 > and narrowing (cached results are discarded when a buffer is modified),
 > which avoids re-running the same queries for unmodified buffers.  Oh,
 > and it also byte-compiles query predicates and action functions to eke
 > out a bit more speed.
 >
 > And in general, I run benchmarks and try to improve performance when
 > possible; you can see some of the benchmark results in the notes.org
 > file in the repo (not all of which are up-to-date with current org-ql
 > code).
 >
 > org-ql-block is just a way to make use of the results returned by org-ql
 > queries; other ways include org-ql-agenda, org-ql-search, and of course
 > you can use the raw results however you like, including calling whatever
 > :action function you like at matching entries, to return whatever kind
 > of data you need, or even perform actions directly on entries.
 >
 > In other words, the querying code is separate from the display-related
 > code, so all org-ql-block, org-ql-agenda, org-ql-search, etc. do is
 > format results from org-ql queries and display them.
 >
 > Upcoming features include an org-ql-sparse-tree command, like
 > org-sparse-tree but using org-ql queries; recursive queries; and
 > probably a timeline view like I recently posted about.
 >
 > Please let me know if you have any feedback!