Nicolas Goaziou <m...@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:
The fact that we need a tool like "doct" to write templates in a
compact
form may be a sign that the data type is not good enough.
Actually it
sounds like a failure somehow.
Agreed. That's why I wrote doct in the first place.
As others have expressed, there's far too many elements required
to ask the user to recall what position they fall in.
A plist is better in that the keys describe their values and can
be specified in any order.
This also makes it easier for people to share templates, because
they can actually tell what the template is intended to do by
looking at it.
Another thing that is confusing about "capture templates" is that
the words "template" and "entry" are overloaded in the
documentation. From the docstring of org-capture-templates:
Templates for the creation of new entries.
Each entry is a list with the following items:
So org-capture-templates is a "list of entries which create new
entries via templates"?
Confusing for me now, let alone the first time I tried to write my
own templates.
doct also does more to check the validity of the template's form
when it is defined.
I prioritized this because the worst time to figure out your
template is malformed is when you go to capture something in the
middle of another, unrelated task.
Should templates definition be more compact out of the box?
Could the
data type be made more powerful to permit more complex templates
without
relying on doct? IOW, can a tool such a doct be made transparent
to the
user?
My initial idea for integrating doct with Org was to just provide
a user option, e.g. org-capture-use-doct-syntax.
Then the only thing needed would be a conditional in
org-capture-upgrade-templates which would delegate to doct when
said user option is non-nil.
That would allow those who are interested in using the feature to
opt-in without breaking existing templates. Then as support for
older syntax is dropped, (if ever? it looks like
`org-capture-upgrade-templates' dates back to early 2017, and I
think it makes sense to retain such a path) those features could
be moved into org-capture.
I'm open to bringing doct's features into Org mode, but I'd prefer
it not to be spread out over another two years.
