You don't need those temporary marks I think. Just store the positions in a variable or use overlays or text properties. You could even make a speed key to run the mark command.
It could be implemented from a helm command pretty easily too. You can easily make multiple selections with helm. Point 3 is a tough one. You might provide a numeric prefix arg that makes all levels the same. That may be easier to manually adjust. On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 1:28 PM Bob Newell <bobnew...@bobnewell.net> wrote: > 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 * > > -- John ----------------------------------- Professor John Kitchin Doherty Hall A207F Department of Chemical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412-268-7803 @johnkitchin http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu
