2.2 Visibility Cycling ¶

Outlines make it possible to hide parts of the text in the buffer. Org uses just two commands, bound to TAB and S-TAB (org-cycle and org-shifttab) to change the visibility in the buffer.

TAB (org-cycle)

Subtree cycling: Rotate current subtree among the states

,-> FOLDED -> CHILDREN -> SUBTREE --.
'-----------------------------------'

When called with a prefix argument (C-u TAB), or with the Shift key, global cycling is invoked.

S-TAB (org-global-cycle)

C-u TAB (org-cycle)

Global cycling: Rotate the entire buffer among the states

,-> OVERVIEW -> CONTENTS -> SHOW ALL --.
'--------------------------------------'

C-u C-u C-u TAB (org-show-all)

Show all, including drawers.

When Emacs first visits an Org file, the global state is set to OVERVIEW, i.e., only the top level headlines are visible. This can be configured through the variable org-startup-folded, or on a per-file basis by adding a ‘STARTUP’ keyword to ‘overview’, ‘content’, ‘showall’, ‘showeverything’ or ‘show<n>levels’ (n = 2..5) like this:

#+STARTUP: content