Re: Restricting the agenda to the current subtree

[Rick Moynihan <rick@calicojack.co.uk>]

Carsten Dominik wrote:
> On Nov 28, 2007 12:23 PM, Rick Moynihan <rick@calicojack.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Carsten Dominik wrote:
>>> I for one do find this idea useful.  Some way to lock all agenda
>>> commands to the current subtree or file, until this lock is removed
>>> again.  I am not sure if I'd like the agenda to automatically follow
>>> while I am moving through a file - this would be slow since agenda
>>> construction does need a finite amount of time.
>> Would it necessarily need to be so slow?  It seems to me that edits are
>> pretty much prohibited during an org-goto, so could you not just build
>> the agenda once for the org-goto session and then filter it to the
>> subtree?  Could that speed it up more, or is it the filtering itself
>> which is slow?  I appreciate this might not be the case, or it might not
>> be possible to architect the system to support this.
> 
> 
> Org-mode does not keep an internal structure of the data it contains.
> Each time information is needed, the original plain text files
> are scanned.  This is the good an bad of plain text files.
> In principle one could of course make an internal structure, index it
> in the appropriate ways and then create many different displays fast.
> But that would require a rewrite of the entire agenda code, and
> intensive bookkeeping to make sure updates happen when
> they are needed.  Since Org-mode is committed to the
> plain text format, this is not going to happen.
> 
> Either way my mentioning of follow was more to indicate the interaction
>> style and browsable nature it encourages, rather than the instantaneous
>> nature of it.  Pressing a single key to rebuild the agenda view for the
>> current subtree would be fantastic and probably easier for you to
>> implement :-)
>>
>>> I have also been thinking about using the sidebar engine to display
>>> something like omnifocus' side bar hierarchy and have mouse clicks
>>> restrict the agenda stuff to the context.  But I guess this is not
>>> needed since we have an outlining buffer anyway...
>> Interesting...  It seems that the org-goto idea and your sidebuffer idea
>> are similar.  You're right that it might not be needed, but it seems
>> that it might be quite nice to render user-defined subtrees in the
>> sidebar, as a kind of shortcut to current projects or outlines of
>> concern.  You're right that it might not be adding any real
>> functionality, but I can see that it might make navigating
>> easier/quicker for some users.  One potential problem is that org seems
>> to encourage outlines to be titles (and consequently they're quite
>> long).  If this were to be browseable in a sidebar you might want
>> represent them with aliases or shortened names, property drawers would
>> be an obvious way to implement this.
> 
> 
> I have tried this, and it actually works reasonably well for me.
> I will put sidebar support into org-mode, so that you can drill
> into an org-mode file (one or two levels deep, maybe) directly
> from the sidebar.  I could also have hot keys in the sidebar
> that will restrict the agenda to the file or subtree the cursor
> points to.  If combined with an immediate update of the agenda
> (if it is visible), this might get close to what you are looking for.
> Together with a command in an Org-mode buffer to restrict to the
> local subtree/file and immediately update the agenda.

Cool, it sounds like it's going to be good.  I can't say I've used the 
speedbar much but I look forward to giving it a shot with org-mode 
(which is the main reason I use Emacs anyway :-) )

My only concern about using the speedbar is that it'll take up more 
screen real estate than the equivalent idea using org-goto, as you'll 
have the speedbar + the fileview + the agenda on screen.  This is 
perhaps a concern for me, as I recently got one of the tiny asus 
eeepc's.  I wrote some opinions on it here:

http://sourcesmouth.co.uk/blog/Forget-the-Linux-Desktop-it-s-the-Linux-Laptop-that-matters.html

It's an awesome machine that works great as a portable note taking 
device (org-mode and Emacs were the first things I installed).  Anyway 
it's working really well for me but the 7" screen means you don't want 
much clutter.

> I think this is going to be *very* nice, thanks for the idea!

No probs!  Thanks again for org-mode, and being so willing to implement 
our ideas.

R.