Re: [O] Broken org-mode "Column width and alignment" in latest version

[Ruy Exel]

Dear Kaushal,

The real treat is to read your nice message and to be a member of such a fantastic group of people!

Following your advice to stick to a stable release I searched for info on how to install it and I found instructions in http://orgmode.org/org.html#Installation telling me to run "M-x package-install RET org RET" from within emacs.  I did it and it all looked like everything was running smoothly untill I was issued the messages:

WARNING: No org-loaddefs.el file could be found from where org.el is loaded.  You need to run "make" or "make autoloads" from Org lisp directory

I am used to this since I first tried the cloned git version, but I noticed that there is no Makefile in the directory containing the newly dowloaded files (~/.emacs.d/elpa/org-20171113/), so I got stuck.

I noticed that in the above installation instructions it is mentioned that:

Important: you need to do this in a session where no .org file has been visited, i.e., where no Org built-in function have been loaded. Otherwise autoload Org functions will mess up the installation.

so I repeated the process right after starting emacs with the --no-init-files option, then I added the line "(package-initialize)" to my initialization file but it still does not work, namely the old org-mode is loaded upon starting emacs.  It is curious that I now have two org-mode entries in the top Emacs-Info node, one for the old version (7.9.3f) and another one for the new one (9.1.2 (release_9.1.2-37-g3f8d67)).

Could I have premanently messed up my emacs installation by not following the above Important advice?

Regards,

Ruy Exel

On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 12:50 AM, Kaushal Modi <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello Ruy,

First of all, thanks for confirming that this worked for you.

Secondly, no question is a newbie question :) This mailing list is one of the friendliest mailing lists I've participated in. So don't worry about upsetting someone, or getting offended. So I am continuing this thread on the mailing list.

Feel free to ask any kind of Org question you might have, and there are many folks here to help you out. 

Further comments are inline below. 

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017, 5:56 PM Ruy Exel <address@hidden> wrote:

> #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
> ,#+STARTUP: align shrink
> #+END_EXAMPLE

Got it!  Thanks very much.

You're welcome. 

I am in fact a brand new user of org-mode and 7.9.3f is just the version which was dormant in my computer before I updated to the GIT version.  Sometimes I use it for comparison.

If you are a brand new user, it's my personal opinion that that stick to the stable release. You get that by cloning the maint branch instead, or getting org or org-plus-contrib via Org Elpa.

The master branch isn't unstable, it's perfectly fine as a daily driver, but some features could be in flux, which could get confusing if you just started using Org.

However I noticed that the online manual at (http://orgmode.org/manual/Column-width-and-alignment.html) is more compatible with that old version than the GIT version.

The online version is synced with the stable releases of Org, which I mentioned above. It's not in sync with the version you think (7.9.3f), but with the latest stable release 9.1.4 (as of today). 

It just happens that the column shrink feature was recently (few months) added to the Org master branch. So you don't see its reference in the online manual. That feature will go out in the next major release of the stable version.. 9.2. 

Of course I do not expect to have a fully working manual for a changing system such as the GIT version,

You're in for a treat here :). This is Emacs, and in my experience the best way to access the Info manuals.  The Info manuals that get built along with Org are always in sync with the respective versions. 

So,

Org master > Manuals: Info (synced with Org master)

Org maint > Manuals: Info, online (synced with Org maint)

If you haven't used Info manuals, do C-h i h to learn how to use those from within Emacs. They are vastly better searchable than the online version. And you always access the correct version of the Org Info manual from within Emacs. 

but in case the above manual is superseded by some other one, I'd like to know where it is.

As above, if using master branch Org, you get the correct version of the manual from within Emacs. 

PS:  I figure this newbie message is not relevant to the folks at address@hidden, so I'am not CCing it there anymore.

As I said in the beginning of the email, don't worry. We are all here to learn and share. 

--

Kaushal Modi