mwolson.org Blog - /Tech

Mon, 21 Jul 2008

Org mode likes and dislikes

I watched the Org-Mode Google Tech Talk video recently. It helped me to understand more of what Org-Mode was about. I thought I'd share some likes and dislikes concerning Org-Mode.

Like:

Dislike:

Open questions:

Posted by Damien Cassou at Mon Jul 21 12:27:08 2008

Unindented text is part of the previous node. It's a place dedicated to put comments.

Posted by piyo at Mon Jul 21 19:07:18 2008

Thanks for the text review. I can't seem to start watching this video.

Text at the left margin will be folded into its parent header, if any. With the default org-mode settings, your file may have lots of headers and comments, but it won't be shown until you start drilling down with the tab key. It is not necessary to indent comment text to get it folded.

I am a recent org-mode user. I find the table modes to be magical and frustrating at the same time. I can sort the columns. I can extract to TSV. I can hide text as long as it does not contain Japanese. But how do I sum a column into a parent header? Okay I know you can do it with "mark region", M-x org-table-sum, M-x yank, but I want to do it the spreadsheet like way, auto-magically.

Posted by cd at Tue Jul 22 10:36:18 2008

You say that you are using M-cursor keys for navigating.  With a special package or just forward/backward word?  Because these are on C-cursor as well.

- Carsten

Posted by Michael Olson at Wed Jul 23 00:44:28 2008

Hi Carsten,

Just forward/backward word.  It's true that they are also on C-cursor, but that is harder for me to type: left thumb (Meta) compared with left pinky (Control).

Posted by cd at Wed Jul 23 01:35:10 2008

Hi Mike,

ok, I can understand that.  I am curious: what replacement keys are you using for structure editing?

- Carsten

P.S.  Hope it is ok to use the comments regions for this "dialog"?

Posted by Michael Olson at Wed Jul 23 11:17:30 2008

Currently I don't use structure editing at all -- I just add another asterisk whenever I want to change the level of a heading and leave the headings on the left margin rather than indenting them.  Muse uses C-< and C-> to decrease/increase list indentation; it might be nice to see those used for structure indentation in Org.

Yeah, it's OK to dialog here :^) .

Posted by cd at Wed Jul 23 17:29:57 2008

Hmm, these make good keys except that you still need something to make the difference between demoting a headline and demoting a subtree.
M-S-cursor will do whole subtrees, M-cursor only the current entry.  But for you, binding them to org-shiftmetaright and org-shiftmetaleft might be the right thing, it would then also work in tables to move columns (but you don't use tables....), and in plain lists.

There is no need to indent any headlines or text below them.  All headlines do start at the left margin, the "indentation" shown in the video is only an optical illusion that you can get by putting

# STARTUP: hidestars

into the buffer and restarting org-mode for that buffer.

Text below a headline will be not afected at all by promoting and demoting the headline above it if at least one line has no indentation at all.  If all lines are indented, Org assumes that you want to indent the text along with the number of stars of a headline and then shift stuff around accordingly.

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