Terry mentioned in Ashland that the bookmarks plugin supports (or will 
support) a bff command.  By analogy with Leo's cff command, it will create 
a bookmark for each node found by a search, with the usual search options 
available. Terry, is bff available now?  If so, how do we get it?

Please note:  no matter what we decide about bff and bookmarks, clones are 
never going to go away :-) For one thing, they provide a way of simulating 
functions in languages such as html.

My first reaction was that bff could provide an almost total replacement 
for clones in my own work flow.  Now I'm doubtful.

In any case, I plan to provide an alternative bookmark interface using 
Leo's standard redrawing code.  So now there would be *two* trees visible 
on the screen, a *bookmarks tree* for bookmarks and Leo's standard *outline 
tree*.  This project should be straightforward, and I plan to do this 
"soon".

How to use the bookmarks tree?  There must be a *simple *way to back and 
forth between the two trees.  Terry uses the mouse.  For me, something like 
a "toggle-trees" command, bound to a key, would be essential. 

There are two advantages to using bookmarks instead of clones.  First, 
selecting a bookmark shows the node (in the outline tree) in context.  That 
is, the outline tree shows the ancestors of the selected node.  Second, a 
bookmark inherently describes just a node, without its children.  This 
would be useful, for example, in adding nodes (but not their children) in 
rst trees.

There are also drawbacks to using bookmarks.  First, the bookmarks tree 
requires substantial screen real estate.  With my old eyes, only Leo's 
existing tree representation will do.  Yes, fonts in the existing bookmarks 
pane could be made larger, but I don't find the representation of structure 
appealing. Second, the toggle-trees command is likely to be a constant 
source of irritation. It's completely natural to switch between the clones 
created by cff. Instead, when using bff, there will be constant *mental* 
overhead in switching between the bookmarks tree and the other tree.

This additional mental burden will likely be akin to the burden of keeping 
track of vim's modes.  Some people have no trouble with it.  Such people 
prefer vim.  Others, myself included, find such a burden to be completely 
intolerable.  We prefer emacs.  This burden might be lessened by using the 
mouse, but that's out of the question for me.

*Summary*

It should be straightforward to add an bookmarks tree as an alternative to 
the present bookmarks pane.

It's likely that some will have a strong preference for bookmarks, while 
others will have a strong preference for clones. This divide mirrors the 
divide between the vim way and the emacs way.

Edward

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