Re: Emulating Scrivener's binder feature

[Paul W. Rankin]

On Tue, Apr 02 2019, Drew Adams wrote:

> > Before I go to far,
>
> Please _do_ go far into this.  Such effort is never wasted, IMO.
>
> > Question 1: Has someone already made something like this?
> > I don't want to reinvent the wheel...
>
> There is not only one wheel.  Wheels often need reinventing.

Thanks Drew, I appreciate the encouragement :)

> FYI, here is something similar, but it does not correspond
> to everything you describe:
>
> 1. You can create a Dired buffer that has any combination
>    of files and directories that you like.  This feature
>    is not very well known, but it's always been there.
>
>    If you use library Dired+ then it's a bit easier to
>    create such buffers interactively (and you can
>    interactively create Dired buffers as unions etc. of
>    other Dired buffers, and add arbitrary files and dirs
>    to an existing Dired buffer).
>
>    However, it is not possible (until someone implements
>    it!) to sort such a Dired buffer with ad hoc entries.

I am a big fan of the `i' key in Dired. I will check out Dired+.

> 2. If you use library Bookmark+ then you can bookmark Dired
>    buffers, including those just described (i.e., with ad
>    hoc entries from anywhere).  Jumping to such a bookmark
>    restores the Dired buffer, including all of its markings
>    omitted files, `ls' switches, inserted subdirs, etc.
>
>    This gives you a persistent way to record and restore
>    the files and dirs of a project, for example.  You can
>    also create different bookmark display lists or different
>    bookmark files, so you can list only the bookmarks for
>    a given project or have different views of a project or
>    parts of a project.  You can also bookmark Emacs desktops,
>    and quickly switch among them, to flip between different
>    projects or different views of a project.
>
>    You can also bookmark a Dired tree.  This gives you a
>    set of Dired bookmarks that represent a hierarchy and
>    are opened together.
>
>    Bookmark+ also lets you tag bookmarks (and so bookmarked
>    files and directories) with arbitrary strings or even
>    Lisp key-value pairs.  This gives you another way to
>    access/view/define sets of bookmarks (thus files & dirs).

Excellent! I think Bookmarks+ will offer a lot of clues on a good 
implementation, as essentially it will be a case of "bookmarking" all 
the files in the project directory in a specific order and 
tagging/annotating them. The other half of things is navigating around 
the project hierachy from the project files themselves (e.g. 
next/previous). Thanks :)

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