Re: Orgmode plain list bullet : change automatically with list depth

[Tim Cross]

Edouard Debry <edouard.debry@gmail.com> writes:

> Are you sure bullet lists are irrelevant to org ?
>
> I tried without success to make a list without "-" or "+" in my
> *scratch*.
>

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The 'marker' which is at the start of a
list item is important to org. What isn't important is the type of list
marker i.e. '-', '+', and '*' are all the same token which designate the
start of a list item when the first character of an indented line. There
is no relationship to item nesting depth. 

The point I was trying to make is that the token when used to convey
other meanings, like nesting depth, sits at the 'human' layer and
therefore, should be 'tweaked' using font-lock i.e. if you want
different tokens to mark different list nesting levels, use font-lock to
adjust the appearance of the token at each level rather than changing
underlying syntax to give '-', '+' and '*' additional meanings they
don't have at the code layer now. This also has the advantage of not
imposing a specific use for different tokens on all users i.e. some
users might want to use all 3 tokens in a list, but not simply to
reflect nesting levels. The disadvantage of using font-lock is that
currently, defining the regular expression can be hard. However, I think
other work being done to allow font-lock to leverage off information
supplied by the parser might simplify that situation. 

So to be clear, I was not saying that the ability to have different
characters to represent different nesting depth in lists was misguided,
only implementing that as part of the syntax and having org enforce it
with actual characters in the file was. Remapping to a different
character for display purposes based on the depth of the list item is
perfectly fine and in-line with similar techniques to do things like
replacing multiple '*' in headers with different single unicode
characters (like the various 'bullets' packages do).