Org-mode has nearly everything that other outlining tools have, and generally much, much more. But one thing that is missing (and there's been sporadic traffic about this) is convenient scatter-gather. BrainStorm WFO has this; it's not like I'm going to start using it as an alternative, but such a feature might be nice in org-mode.
The Emacs way is to write it yourself, and I'm thinking about that. But I wanted to try out the concept and see if it's of interest, or for that matter, more trouble than it's worth. You can do something like this on the Agenda screen, but that's not a general solution at all. What about an "ordinary" org mode file. So here's the flow I envision. 1. You "mark" a series of headline entries with, say, 'org-sg-mark'. Perhaps it would look like this when marked: ** ! interesting headline Yes, this disturbs the existing text. But the marking has to be somehow visual. 2. You give a command like 'org-sg-gather' and the marked headlines are gathered up, moved (just like archiving) to a file (for which you're prompted) or maybe, optionally to the top or bottom of the current buffer. The marks are then cleared. 3. 'org-sg-clear' clears a single mark; 'org-sg-clear-all' clears them all. Potential problems: 1. As mentioned, text is disturbed at least temporarily. 2. Incomplete operation sequences leave marks in place, when they might be useless. 3. If the gathered headlines are at different levels, the resulting gathered outline will not be sensible and will require manual fixing. Comments welcome. This doesn't look especially difficult to code, but does it make sense and is it of any use? -- Bob Newell Honolulu, Hawai`i * Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *
