Melpa

[ghost]

First of all, thank you for this package, it's awesome!

I've installed it manually and giving it a try. So far so good.

However, I wonder if it could be added to Melpa? I can imagine it benefiting lots of people.

[jkitchin]

I am not planning to put it in melpa. This implementation is too fragile I think. I have a new approach called scimax-editmarks that I like better. Maybe one day that could make it to melpa, but it isn't ready yet.

[ghost]

Thank you for the immediate response. I understand that. Have had some issues with the commenting bit in fact. Just checked the scimax project and saw org-editmarks.el in there, I may give it a spin. Doesn't have underlining functions, only commenting, right?

[jkitchin]

org-editmarks is also a package that is basically deprecated in my mind. It is based on org-links, which have their own limitations for editmarks (mostly they are limited to one line).

If you mean highlighting, then no, it doesn't have that built in. scimax-editmarks does though.

[ghost]

ohh, ok. Thanks a lot for clearing that out. So, scimax-editmarks is the one I need to try.

[jkitchin]

That is the one I am actively developing and using now. It is kind of like criticmarks, with persistent markup in the files.

[nhmacuk]

Oh that's a shame, as ov-highlight seems to me to be the current best package to persistently highlight code. Do I understand correctly that scimax-editmarks wouldn't be able to do that, since it would change the contents (that is what I have encountered so far trying to use it to highlight parts of code)?

[jkitchin]

Code highlighting would be a good application for ov-highlight. scimax-editmarks would not be suitable, since it adds markup which would ruin the code.

ov-highlight is still fragile though, and especially with code in a vc repo where any commit could basically break it. I don't have a good solution for that. Maybe it isn't a good solution to put the highlights in the code file, it might be better to store them externally. That is still fragile, but wouldn't add irrelevant stuff to the file.

I don't have much time these days for playing around with these ideas, but they are still interesting to me. Maybe with enough other interest, and killer application of it, I might find some time in the summer to try some of these.

[nhmacuk]

That solution would be nice for me as well. For personal use (reading code) it is already useful to me as it is (even in collaboration e.g. sending screenshots with questions about spefic parts, pointing multiple parts at once without the mouse with multiple colors) and I think it's nicely compact and comprehensive that the highlights are currently contained in the file itself.

[clintgibler]

Thanks so much for this project, it's quite helpful! 🙏

For another data point - I'm using org mode (and org-roam) to collect and organize my notes, including content I personally write, snippets from talks and papers, as well as snippets from articles online.

I want to be able to highlight snippets of these notes, ideally using a handful of colors. I did some searching, and to my surprise (given how many amazing, powerful Emacs libraries there are out there), there are very few that provide this functionality. If there's a clear or standard way to do this, please let me know!

ov-highlight seems to do just what I need, so I'm a bit sad that this is somewhat deprecated in your mind. Which shouldn't be a problem, I believe its existing functionality should be sufficient for my needs.

For my use case, I expect to be the only one pushing to the notes git repo, so merging shouldn't break the highlights.

[jkitchin]

I don't think ov-highlight is going anywhere, and for personal use it is probably fine. I hardly have any time to develop these ideas anymore though, and I don't have plans for further development of this idea at this time.

[clintgibler]

Thanks for the context, that's good to know. It seems to be great for my needs as is, thanks again for making it! 👍