Re: Reconciling org-mode idiosyncrasies with Emacs core

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

Hi Nicolas,

I took a stab at making RET obey electric-indent-mode in org-mode.  I've
got something working; I'd like to ask for a review before moving on to
Changelog and ORG-NEWS entries (and tackling C-j… and maybe writing a
few unit tests?).

Here's the patch, with some additional comments below:

org-return.patch
Description: Text Data

Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> writes:

> Kévin Le Gouguec <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Do you think a patch that
>>
>> - tweaked org-return (bound to RET) to default its INDENT argument to
>>   the current value of electric-indent-mode,

After taking an in-depth look at 'org-return' and 'newline', I decided
to "let the knife do the work" and simply keep calling 'newline', though
with additional arguments:

- INTERACTIVE is what makes 'newline' run 'post-self-insert-hook' (thus
  triggering indentation through electric-indent-mode),

- ARG wasn't strictly necessary, but it seemed harmless to add it, and
  it allows inserting multiple newlines, thus removing one more "Org
  idiosyncrasy".

I felt that introducing org--newline made the code clearer, but I can
understand if it seems too trivial to keep.  I took the liberty of using
this function in the "list item" case too, otherwise there's no way to
indent the trailing text.


> The change will not appear overnight in Org, i.e., not in Org stable's
> branch (Org 9.3.X), and it will be announced in ORG-NEWS.

I'll work on ORG-NEWS (plus Changelog entries, plus unit tests) as soon
as I'm confident that my approach is satisfactory.

(Out of curiosity, could it be argued that this is solving a "bug" in
org-mode and, as such, could be committed to Emacs core first, then
backported to the org-mode repository?  I don't feel strongly either
way, I wouldn't want to make things more complicated for Org
maintainers.)


Now for C-j, in order to minimize breakage (for anyone calling
org-return-indent from Lisp code) and simplify disabling the new
behaviour (by simply turning off electric-indent-mode in Org), should we
bind C-j to a new function?  E.g.:

(defun org-return-and-maybe-indent ()
  (interactive)
  (org-return (not electric-indent-mode)))


Thank you for your time.