Ken Mankoff <mank...@gmail.com> writes: > Hi Bastien, > > Thanks for letting me know it displays properly and email received. The > URL works for me this morning too. > > On 2014-04-14 at 05:22, Bastien wrote: >> Even for those who uses MacOSX, you should perhaps be more specific >> on how Org-mode would store such links, then somebody might step up. > > Aliases are a type of links ("ln" on linux, "shortcut" on Windows > "alias" on OS X (OS X of course also supports "ln")). The difference > between an OS X alias and "ln" is that if the target is moved, the OS X > alias still points to it, and double-clicking on an alias (or issuing > the "open" command in a terminal) will open the target, wherever it > is. I just checked in a VM and Windows Shortcuts also behave this way. > > Therefore, if in addition to "file:" there were an "alias:" option, Org > could link to files that move. I think this is a powerful feature. I > imagine "alias:" would be an option when I press C-cl, and a way to set > it as the default when I press C-ucl. > > That is, links would be [[alias:foo][FileName]] where "foo" is a string > version (hashed?) of the alias. > > In BibDesk, "foo" is ~1200 characters long, and according to the BibDesk > documentation, that ~1200 characters is: > >> The Bdsk-File entries store Mac OS aliases, which contain a file ID >> and absolute path. Bdsk-File entries also store a relative path, which >> is used if the alias is broken. > > So it looks like an Alias can be hashed some way and stored as just a > string. An example BibDesk entry in by BibTeX file looks like: > > @article{citekey, > Author = {Someone}, > Journal = {Nature}, > Pages = {24--42}, > Title = {{A Paper}}, > Bdsk-File-1 = {YnBsa...etc for 1200 characters...}} > > Opening the file with C-o would involve un-hashing it, and then treating > it the same way a "file:" is opened. > > I imagine Org would mostly store the links the same way it stores file > links. The change would be that since the link is the alias (long ugly > string), the description would be required, and perhaps default to > /path/to/filename. Although since the whole point is that the /path/to/ > can change, perhaps the default name would just be filename. >
What does emacs do when you C-x C-f an alias? If it opens it properly (i.e. opens the target file) then why is anything needed in org? It seems to me that a file: link should just work. If it does not, then maybe that's where the capability should be added. Org seems to be the wrong place for it. But note that everything I know about aliases, I learnt in the last five minutes, so I could be way off the mark. -- Nick