Org has in-buffer completions with M-TAB. No minibuffer is involved. Type one or more letters and invoke the hot key to complete the text in-place.
For example, this command will complete TeX symbols after ‘\’, TODO keywords at the beginning of a headline, and tags after ‘:’ in a headline.
To quickly insert empty structural blocks, such as ‘#+BEGIN_SRC’ … ‘#+END_SRC’, or to wrap existing text in such a block, use
org-insert-structure-template)Prompt for a type of block structure, and insert the block at point. If the region is active, it is wrapped in the block.
Org’s default outline with stars and no indents can become too cluttered for short documents. For book-like long documents, the effect is not as noticeable. Org provides an alternate stars and indentation scheme, as shown on the right in the following table. It uses only one star and indents text to line with the heading:
* Top level headline | * Top level headline
** Second level | * Second level
*** Third level | * Third level
some text | some text
*** Third level | * Third level
more text | more text
* Another top level headline | * Another top level headline
This kind of view can be achieved dynamically at display time using
Org Indent mode (M-x org-indent-mode RET), which prepends
intangible space to each line. You can turn on Org Indent mode for
all files by customizing the variable org-startup-indented, or you
can turn it on for individual files using
#+STARTUP: indent
If you want the indentation to be hard space characters so that the plain text file looks as similar as possible to the Emacs display, Org supports you by helping to indent (with TAB) text below each headline, by hiding leading stars, and by only using levels 1, 3, etc to get two characters indentation for each level. To get this support in a file, use
#+STARTUP: hidestars odd