2.6 Sparse trees

An important feature of Org mode is the ability to construct sparse trees for selected information in an outline tree, so that the entire document is folded as much as possible, but the selected information is made visible along with the headline structure above it¹. Just try it out and you will see immediately how it works.

Org mode contains several commands creating such trees, all these commands can be accessed through a dispatcher:

C-c /

This prompts for an extra key to select a sparse-tree creating command.

C-c / r

Occur. Prompts for a regexp and shows a sparse tree with all matches. Each match is also highlighted; the highlights disappear by pressing C-c C-c.

The other sparse tree commands select headings based on TODO keywords, tags, or properties and will be discussed later in this manual.