[DISCUSSION] org-capture.el vs remember.el (was: [ELPA] New package: jami-bot and org-jami-bot)

[Ihor Radchenko]

Recent emacs-devel discussion brought up some concerns about org-capture
being very specific to Org mode and not integrated with the rest of
Emacs.

However, org-capture was once built on top of the built-in remember.el
before it was refactored into independent code by Carsten:
https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/C46F10DC-DE51-43D4-AFFE-F71E440D1E1F@gmail.com/

The refactoring de-coupled what used to be org-remember.el into
completely rewritten org-capture.el that added important features that
could not be implemented within remember.el framework:

1. org-capture arranges writing the text to remember directly into the
   target location where it is to be stored. This addressed an important
   problem of remember.el - remember.el always uses temporary buffer for
   user input and does not save it until remember-finalize is executed
   explicitly. A number of users sometimes forgot to call
   remember-finalize, leading to annoying data losses.

2. remember.el only allows a single text input at a time. org-capture
   makes it possible for users to write multiple notes in parallel.

I am wondering if it would be possible to have the above two key
features supported by remember.el. Then, org-capture.el could go back to
re-using remember.el infrastructure and thus reduce code duplication.

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > org-jami-bot builds upon jami-bot and extends it with Org mode capture
>   > functionality for text messages and images.
>
> This feature will be useful.  I am not concretely sure what "capture
> functionality" includes, but if it provides higher-level communication
> between Emacs and Jami, that is a good thing.
>
> At the same time, it seems to be implemented in a way that imposes an
> evitable restriction -- requiring use of Org mode.
>
> Dependence of various features on Org mode causes problems in two ways:
>
> * It makes those features hard to use for those that don't use Org mode.
>
> * It adds the need to learn Org mode to the need to learn Emacs itself.
>
> Therefore, new features which make sense indepdently of Org mode
> should be usable without Org mode.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>