Bug#861124: ITP: elpa-writeroom-mode -- distraction-free writing for Emacs
control: pending -1
Hi Antoine,
On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 08:04:56AM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> On 2017-04-24 20:37:20, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> > control: owner -1
> > control: retitle -1 ITP: elpa-writeroom-mode -- distraction-free writing for Emacs
> >
> > Hi Antoine,
> >
> > I've been using a moderately customised local copy of writeroom-mode
> > forked from upstream many years ago, so of course I'd love to maintain
> > an official elpafied Debian package of it. :-)
>
> Well, the RFP was for the official version of course. :p But I guess it
> would be fine if your improvements are packaged as well!
>
> > How responsive is upstream to patches?
>
> Pretty responsive, I'd say. If you look at the Github pull request list:
[...]
> I have specifically requested two things, which got more or less
> implemented completely:
>
> https://github.com/joostkremers/writeroom-mode/issues/22
> https://github.com/joostkremers/writeroom-mode/issues/24
Nice! Sorry I was unclear, I meant I'll package the official version
and send patches or pull requests to upstream.
> > I find it really useful to remove the fringes and margins when going
> > from fullscreen to windowed, and to have modeline enabled for
> > fullscreen, for battery status, clock, word count, etc, but to have
> > these disabled for windowed.
>
> That seems completely counter-intuitive to me, but I guess if those are
> made into separate modes, that should be fine. :)
:-) Exactly. My setup is a bit bizarre, but it basically evolved to
cope with the transition from a 17" 4:3 screen to a 10" 16:9 netbook,
and to get positive feedback from the word count and pressure from the
clock while typing way too forcefully while trying to meet deadlines.
It would be even more intense with a countdown timer... The premise
being that you sit down to write, start writeroom, and the combo of
the carrot and stick helps with productivity: an interval of working
fast, then a relaxing and/or thinking/planning interval.
> > One of my other little personal projects is to change the font size
> > when going between windowed and fullscreen.
>
> That seems like a good idea - a separate effect too?
I haven't actually done the work for it yet, but I've been wanting to
implement it "someday" for years. I think the easiest thing to do,
for the purposes of writeroom, would probably be to configure a
scaling factor for 'text-scale-adjust as part of the fullscreen hook.
> > Do you know if tiling WMs provide the necessary netwm hints for these
> > to work properly?
>
> Depends on the WMs. My experience with Xmonad so far has not been very
> positive. I had to create a custom effect for fullscreen and the tiling
> mode. I documented the sticky part here:
>
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2017-April/015260.html
>
> The fullscreen part is better supported, but oddly a signal is missing
> on writeroom's side, which is documented in issue #22 above...
>
> Anwyays, this is all stuff that should be discussed in the upstream
> trackers, and not necessarily here. I think we should try to follow
> upstream as closely as possible here and get patches merged back
> upstream.
Merged back, for sure. Is the "discuss it on the BTS first" policy
for more users->BTS->maintainers->upstream?
> So I encourage you to submit pull requests and issues for the things you
> feel need to change in writeroom. So far, I have managed to use it
> without patching it, and that is why I would like it to be packaged as
> is in Debian.
Preliminary packaging is here:
ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-emacsen/pkg/writeroom-mode.git
I need to email to team to find out what the preferred way of managing
things in the VCS during a deep freeze (eg: push tags only, push an
experimental branch and keep master's changelog UNRELEASED, etc).
Also, I'm not sure what to license debian/* as wrt BSD-3-clause.
> I'd be happy to help you with the packaging if you need that or upload
> if you need a sponsor or co-maintain if you're open to that. ;)
> Otherwise, please go ahead and package this, it's great that someone is
> stepping up so quickly to volunteer!
>
> Thanks,
>
> A.
>
> PS: nice to see you here Nicholas :)
Nice to see you too :-D I'm highly motivated when people I know ask
for something, and it's also (finally) something I'm familiar with.
There's a part of me that feels "Aha! I found my niche, my project to
prove I can be a DD...my selfish glory!" but that's overshadowed by
"It's way more fun and more meaningful to work as a team".
I'm thinking of something like an article and some streamlined
configurations for "Emacs for professional, technical, and creative
writing for everyone who didn't learn to use it as an IDE", plus
packaging all the bits that help boost focused productivity. Maybe
mentioning ErgoEmacs... Alternatively, it wouldn't be that hard to
make hitting the word-count target play a nice sound or do something
funny with nyan-mode :p
Take care,
Nicholas
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