Re: Proposal: 'executable' org-capture-templaes

[Arthur Miller]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>>> By "generic" I did not mean general-purpose all-functional framework.
>>> We just need something to remove code duplication in
>>> org-export-dispatch, org-agenda, org-capture, org-set-tags-command, etc
>>> They all share pretty similar code to generate dialogues.
>>>
>>> As for familiarity, I understand and it is exactly the reason why I
>>> suggested to factor out the menu code from capture templates.
>>
>> I am not really familiar with those other dialogues but org-capture, so I 
>> only
>> had that one in the mind. Yes, I agree if the similar code is used/shared in
>> several places than it does make sense to refactor it out.
>
> This refactoring could be a practical way to get something similar to
> your proposal into Org core. At least, if the menus are factored out
> appropriately.

As I see from 'org-capture' function, it does not seem to be terribly hard to
factor menu creation out. There seem to be two parts: template selection which
is already done by 'org-capture-select-template' function, and then the main
work that one has to implement on its own, which is specific to whatever one
would like to implement. I just did a quick refactor to test the idea:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(require 'org-capture)
(defun org-menu (&optional goto keys)
  (interactive "P")
  (let* ((entry (org-capture-select-template keys)))
    (cond
     ((equal entry "C")
      (customize-variable 'org-capture-templates))
     ((equal entry "q")
      (user-error "Abort"))
     (t
      (let ((f (nth 2 entry)))
        (if (not f) (error "Missing function specification.")
          (if (commandp f) (call-interactively f)
            (if (functionp f) (funcall f)
              (error "Invalid function specification.")))))))))

(defun org-capture-some-menu ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((org-capture-templates
         `(("F" "Functions")
           ("Fh" "Hello World"
            (lambda ()
              (message "Hello, World")))
           ("Ff" "Find file" ,(function find-file)))))
    (org-menu)))

(define-key global-map (kbd "C-S-m") #'org-capture-some-menu)
#+end_src

Instead of hardcoding the actual work in the conditional statement, there should
be a function to be called, so org-capture would setup its own work, some random
"exec" menu like here would setup its own and so on. I haven't look at other
parts of org you have mentioned, so I am not yet sure if the approach would work
for all the kids in the block. I don't think it would that much harder to
refactor this out, but I might be wrong, since I am not that familiar with org 
code.

Factoring this out of Org itself, as suggested by RMS in the link you posted
might be much more work though. I haven't looked at that, and question is if
that is really worth the effort? I would agree with him that things like
org-table and date/time handling would be great to have in entire Emacs, without
need to load org, at least bigger parts of it. If I remember well, table mode
started outside of org as its own minor mode and got merged into org.

> The above statement is a hint that patches are welcome :)

As said, I am not that well familiar with org in-depth, and with other places
that might need to be factored out, so I don't promise anything. Initially I
just got a quick idea while working on a project of mine with org-capture, and
hacked the 'org-capture' function to implement my idea :).

/a