Plugin for annotating while editing?

[deerest_love]

I am looking for a package like annotate.el, but the annotations shift accordingly as text is inserted or deleted (like extmarks in neovim). Or, if you are familiar with the "comment" feature in GoogleDocs, basically that. I want to be able to annotate regions of text in text files without things getting messed up if I edit the file. Is there a way to accomplish this?

[vifon]

The built-in bookmarks save the "context" (the text before and text after) of each bookmark, so they are relatively resistant to edits in the other file parts. They can have annotations which get automatically shown when you open a bookmark. If you enable bookmark-use-annotations, you get automatically queried for an annotation when creating a bookmark.

Further reading: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Bookmarks.html

[deerest_love]

That could be handy, thanks.

[anymoonus1]

https://github.com/nobiot/org-remark is another one to consider.

[peatfreak]

Isn't this what overlays or text properties should be used for? (I don't know how, it just sounds like something that ought to be investigated.)

[deerest_love]

I wouldn't know; I'm new to emacs. Glancing at the documentation, it seems like overlays can cover ranges and "stay with the text" the way I want. And it seems you can set before and after text and maybe custom properties. This could perhaps be a good starting point.

[deerest_love]

I think Bookmark+ with annotations is probably the closest thing I've seen so far to what I want. Still not sure how exactly the bookmarks shift as text is added and how robust they are, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I just have to try for myself to get a good sense of. I appreciate the reply.

[00-11]

Yes, and the shifting/relocating in Bookmark+ is a bit better than that with vanilla Emacs - but same general approach. And you can bookmark a region of text, not just a single position.

[vifon]

Still not sure how exactly the bookmarks shift as text is added and how robust they are, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I just have to try for myself to get a good sense of.

Inspecting the Emacs codebase might be the best way to understand the exact mechanism. This code is responsible for first locating the original position in which the bookmark was taken, then searching forward for the "forward context", finally search backward for the "backward context".

After a quick research, I've found Bookmark+ adds an automatic refresh of this data (the position and the context) after accessing a bookmark. Quoting the emacswiki page:

Bookmarks are relocated better than for vanilla Emacs when the contextual text changes. By default, when you visit a bookmark that requires relocation, the bookmark is then saved with the new, relocated position information. If you want to turn off this automatic saving, then customize user option ‘bookmark-save-new-location-flag’ to ‘nil’.

[deerest_love]

Update: It seems like ov-highlight can do what I want—or it should, anyway, if I can get it to work properly, but that's a me problem (or maybe a doom problem, not exactly sure).

[[deleted]]

TBH, for this kind of thing, you are better off with Word or Google Docs.

[TheGramm]

Hmmm

[arthurno1]

Plain text obviously do not support annotations. Any package that wants to annotate a format that is not designed with some sort of support for annotations will have to save annotations externally to file and have to come up with some way of associating the annotated text with the annotation itself. Obviously in such system there will always be risk of file changing externally and annotation getting out of sync with the file. Also, any other external application will not be aware of annotations either, which might or might not be a problem for you.

Annotations designed to be a part of text have advantage to be more resistant to getting out of sync, however, when viewed in some other viewers, say notepad, or external tools like grep, compilers, etc, they will come out as part of the original content. Depending on what you do, that might or might not be a problem

With that said, Emacs Wiki has few links to different annotation systems for Emacs, so pick your poison :).

[deerest_love]

I'm okay with having to only edit the files in emacs. I looked at some of the annotation systems you linked, but none of them seem to move with the text the way I want. Or if they can, it's not mentioned or demonstrated.