Together: The Old And New Work Much Better!

Together: The Old And New Are Much Better!

1. Executive Summary

Emacs has had long-standing features like outline-mode and outline-minor-mode that often get forgotten in the face of newer affordances like org-mode. At the same time, Emacs continues to acquire new features — in this article, I am specifically alluding to repeat-mode. The combinatorial explosion that is the result of the various ways of bringing these together is mind-boggling — and often the result is that one fails to take advantage of what has become possible. The result is that one ends up sticking to one's long-established habits at the risk of failing to significantly enhance one's productivity.

2. Background

• Structured navigation is a significant productivity enhancer — especially in my case since I rely exclusively on an auditory interface.
• The above applies to both textual documents and programming source.
• Starting all the way back in 1991, I started using folding-mode to organize code into hierarchical containers that could be expanded and collapsed; and this is what makes Emacs' eco-system amazing; folding-mode still works and is available on melpa in 2023.
• About a year ago one of the Emacs maintainers (Stefan Mounier) helped me update portions of Emacspeak, and in the process pointed out that I could just use outline-minor-mode to expand and collapse sections of code in .el files.
• At the time I filed this away for later use — I was still reluctant to abandon the 30+ year investment in folding-mode.
• About a year ago, I discovered repeat-mode in Emacs and started leveraging it for everything — including outline-mode and org-mode amongst others.
• Despite the years of investment in folding-mode, it had one drawback; keeping the fold-marks (special comments) in sync was always a bit of a hastle.

  • Bringing The Old And New Together

    This week I brought all of the above context together to:

• Cut over the Emacspeak codebase to stop using folding-mode.
• Turning the fold-marks to comments that outline-minor-mode understood was a trivial application of my typo.plPerl script.
• I had already set up Emacspeak to use repeat-mode for the various outline modes.
• Another annoyance with outline that I had fixed over 20+ years ago was to pick an easier to press prefix-key for outline; I use C-o.

3. The Resulting Experience

• I can now skim the Emacspeak sources (as well as the Emacs sources of course) with very few keystrokes.
• Example: Pressing C-o C-n navigates by section headings; when skimming, I only need to press C-o the first time thanks to repeat-mode.
• I also bound j and k in the outline-mode keymaps to avoid having to chord when skimming — j is easier to press than C-n.

4. For The Future

• Would be nice to enhance outline-minor-mode to understand sectioning comments in other programming languages.
  • The annoyance with the default (and unusable) prefix key for the outline modes needs to fix in Emacs core.