Re: Changed list indentation behavior: how to revert?

[Tim Cross]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com> writes:
>
>> Kévin Le Gouguec writes:
>>
>>> Detlef Steuer <steuer@hsu-hh.de> writes:
>>> Note that indenting section bodies by default predates Org 9.4: in Org
>>> 9.3, hitting TAB on the first line of text after a heading indents it to
>>> column LEVEL+1.
>>
>> Yes, org-adapt-indentation has been around (with a default of t) since
>> 4be4c5623 (version 4.12a, 2008-01-31).
>>
>>> IMHO, the default value of org-adapt-indentation might be the issue here
>>> (made more visible by the change in 9.4): I agree that hard-indenting
>>> prose should not be the default behaviour.  FWIW the .dir-locals.el file
>>> at the root of Org's own repository sets this variable to nil; maybe
>>> that suggests that it would be a better default?
>>
>> Perhaps.  I certainly prefer org-adapt-indentation at nil and would vote
>> for that if we were introducing the option today, but this would be
>> changing a longstanding default.
>>
>> So, it seems that changing Org to honor electric-indent-mode is now
>> making some users aware of org-adapt-indentation and that its default
>> value is not what they want.
>
> Thanks for clarifying this Kyle.
>
> So essentially, this change has been made to make org-mode consistent
> with the rest of emacs which enabled electric-indent by default in Emacs
> 24. this is a good thing. Org should be consistent with other modes. Any
> differences are likely to be the source of confusion and bug reports.
>
> I am a little confused about the purpose of org-adapt-indentation
> though. According to the org news file, to get back the old behaviour,
> it says to explicity disable electric-indent mode using org-mode-hook.
> There is no mention of org-adapt-indentation.
>
> Is this just an artefact from before and in effect, we have two methods
> to disable the indentation behaviour? Is there anything functionally
> different between disabling electric-indent by calling
> electric-indent-local-mode -1 or setting org-adapt-indent to nil or is
> the result functionally equivalent?
>

Following up to my own question. The two are NOT functionally equivalent
in that org-adapt-indentation supports other values than t or nil. You
can use this variable to tweak how the adaptive indentation works. While
setting it to nil may be equivalent to turning of electric-indent mode,
it can be used to adjust how adaptive indentation works as well.

Tim

--
Tim Cross