When I launched #Orgro, my mobile #Emacs #orgmode app, in 2020, one of the first feature requests I got was support for editing.
I'm happy to announce, three years later, that experimental editing support is ready for beta testing:
https://github.com/amake/orgro/issues/6#issuecomment-1713920175
The major hurdles I had to jump over were:
1. Retaining enough information, especially white space, from the original document to reproduce it from the AST verbatim
Discussion:
https://github.com/petitparser/dart-petitparser/discussions/142
There didn't seem to be any silver bullets for this, so I just slogged through explicitly capturing white space tokens in org_parser.
First, thanks very much to @renggli for this wonderful library, but also for helping out the community with the discussions here. I have a PetitParser-based parser that I use in a viewer applicatio...
2. Deciding on the AST editing model
I designed the AST to be immutable, and I didn't want to give that up, so it was a challenge figuring out how to enable editing.
I had heard of zippers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_(data_structure)) but never used them. After some struggle I managed to wrap my head around them, and found that they fit well with the #Flutter reactive state paradigm.
3. A challenge I've only started looking at: UI
It doesn't seem feasible to offer a pure text-editing UI like Emacs. I'm not sure such a UI would be ergonomic on a mobile device anyway.
So what will I make editable and through what kinds of UI controls? So far I have:
- Tap a list iteme checkbox to toggle it
- Long press a section headline to pop up a menu from which you can cycle the TODO state
Additional editing features will probably depend on a lot on the use case.
Aaron “Abolish ICE” Madlon-Kay