Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Phillip Lord]

Thorsten Jolitz <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Phillip Lord) writes:
>> It is really nice. There is a similar solution in org-mode (the export
>> dispatcher) and even in auctex (which is simpler but generally works out
>> the right thing to do for you).
>>
>> All of them are text, all of the fast and all of them easy to use (but
>> slightly different). Having a generic library that could be reused by
>> different packages would be great.
>
> I like these 'dispatcher popup-menus' too, they are a very nice UI
> feature in cases there are a lot of choices for the user. 
>
> I once tried to reuse them in a project, but there is generally no
> separation of UI and logic, its all mixed up, so starting from scratch
> seemed easier than reusing what is already there.

Yes, I would agree, although I would say that starting from scratch but
with the agreement of the org and magit developers to replace their
GUIs.


> How would a generic UI generator look like in this case? Wouldn't it be
> very complicated to prompt the user for all the dispatcher-menu-UI
> properties? Where to put what on the dispatcher UI?

A tree of property lists would be my way to go. Magit is, I think,
something like this at the moment.


> May be an Org table would be a good input format:
>
>
> #+BEGIN_ORG
> | (key . fun) |             |             |
> |-------------+-------------+-------------|
> |             |             |             |
> | (key . fun) | (key . fun) | (key . fun) |
> | (key . fun) | (key . fun) |             |
> |             |             |             |
> | (key . fun) | (key . fun) |             |
> |-------------+-------------+-------------|
> |             | (key . fun) |             |
> #+END_ORG
>
>
>
> so that the user specifies the dispatcher-grid as an Org table, with hlines
> and key/function pairs, and a generic dispatcher-ui-generator function
> or macro then gets the nested-list representation of that Org table as
> argument:
>
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :results output raw
> (org-table-map-tables
>  (lambda () (print (org-table-to-lisp))))
> #+END_SRC

That would be a good addition, I think.

Phil