On Wed, Aug 24 2011, Samuel Wales wrote: > Here is a different solution. It is from my notes from long ago. > > To me, one issue with indenting is that you expect the previous line > to be a direct parent, analogously with the outline. This conflicts > with sorting and non-child descendents. > > If you sort, you can't take advantage of the feature and have it look > right. If it's not a direct child, you can't take advantage of it > either because you either confusingly indent too much or modify the > semantics. Also, indenting interferes with putting as much > information on the line as possible. Those with large fonts or small > (e.g. mobile) displays value the real estate. > > === > > Here is an alternate, which might or might not satisfy the OP's needs > tangentially, but might spark discussion in either case. > > One feature I have long wanted, but have not been able to implement, > is to dim (or color) any agenda entry that has a descendant in the > same agenda view. > > === > > This is a completely different thing from dimming blocked > tasks, because it only looks at other tasks in the same > view, and doesn't care about todo keywords. > > The pseudocode is this: > > loop for i in all headlines in agenda (even a combined agenda) > if i has an ancestor in agenda, dim that ancestor >
This is interesting, and certainly could be a potential display option. It still sort of begs the question of how to get level and/or child/ancestor information attached to the collected TODOs as they're being produced for the agenda views. I'm starting with the easiest use-case: attaching a "level" text property to each TODO. I'm trying to do this for TODOs produced by `org-todo-list' (used by the ?t and ?T dispatch commands) and `org-tags-view' (used by the ?m and ?M dispatchers). The former employs `org-agenda-get-day-entries' and then `org-agenda-get-todos' to find its TODOs, the latter uses `org-scan-tags'. I've put code into both `org-agenda-get-todos' and `org-scan-tags' that attaches a "level" property to outgoing TODOs, and so far that's working okay. A smarter thing to do would probably be attaching a "parent" property that points to the parent headline. Different display options could then use that information to munge the agenda display in different ways: dimming, indenting, prefixing a path, etc. Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud here! If the org gurus have any pointers or warnings, that would be appreciated… Eric