improvement ideas

[simonmichael]

Brainstorming some ideas for your consideration before release; perhaps you have thought of them already. Posted in one issue to reduce clutter:

Short command names

wg- and -workgroups are redundant, what do you think about shortening to the easier wg-create, wg-open, wg-kill etc. ?

Combined open-create

One command that opens an existing workgroup or creates a new one if the named workgroup does not exist, is less to think about than two. I think the old wg-switch-to-workgroup command worked this way. Would adding wg-open-or-create be a good idea ?

Fewer commands

If the above is added, perhaps the separate wg-open and wg-create commands would be unnecessary complexity ? They could be dropped, leaving just wg-open-or-create which could be renamed to wg-open or wg-use, eg.

Rename

I think a wg-rename will be useful, this is something people will do a lot.

Workgroup names

The "First workgroup" created by workgroup-mode and the "wgN" names suggested by wg-create-workgroup are inconsistent. I suppose that makes implementation simpler but it looks a little strange. No clear idea here yet.

Selecting startup group

Currently the first workgroup created is the one always selected by workgroups-mode at startup. People will want to change this somehow. No clear ideas yet.

workgroups-mode

I think this causes a little bit of confusion right now. FIrst, in some but not all places it is called a minor mode. Is it major or minor ? Is it really a mode at all, or just a globally-activated feature ? Second, currently users have to understand it and choose whether to activate it or not. Does it really need to exist ?

Safer writing to wg-session-file

To avoid losing data when workgroups2 is used in multiple Emacs instances, perhaps wg-open-workgroup could re-read the file right before updating and saving it. This wouldn't survive a stress test, but I think it would solve the data loss problem in normal usage.