I'd like to request that org's keybindings be separated from the functions they
use to do their work.
This would greatly ease the use of these functions by people who want to use
their own keybindings rather than relying on keybindings that org provides.
The reason I ask is that recently I've been going through org-agenda.el and
binding its functions in to my own hydras, in a way that makes sense to me and
is compatible with my own pre-existing keybindings. I've found that in many
cases the default org keybindings are tightly integrated with their
functionality. In some cases it's possible to decouple them with some
reverse-engineering effort, but in other cases it's virtually impossible
without rewriting the function -- and even understanding how an org function
does its work is often difficult.
One example of this is the "org-agenda" dispatcher function, which (for
example) offers no clear way to independently invoke the "<" ("Buffer,
subtree/region restriction") or ">" ("Remove restriction") commands.
Another example is the definition of org-agenda-custom-commands, which require
the user to go through the org-agenda dispatcher to invoke their custom agenda
views. Those views would ideally be accessible by simple functions that the
user could call directly any way they see fit.
As a user, it would make my life so much easier if I didn't have to delve
deeply in to a menuing function's source code to figure out how it works so
that I can bind something it does to a keyboard shortcut (or hydra) of my
choice.
Ideally, each org menu's keybinding would be an exceedingly simple binding to a
single function that should be just as easily invocable from user code as it is
from org's own code. It should not be buried in a mountain of logic and
assumptions in the middle of a function that builds up a ton of state before
the inner function is callable, as that would require the user to reproduce
that state before they could use the function themselves.
Ultimately, I think it would be much, much cleaner for org to use a dedicated,
well designed menuing package like hydra to do its menuing. But simply
decoupling org's keybindings from the functionality they invoke would be a
great first step.
