Re: Property for startup visibility?

["bva@alexanderonline.org" <bva@alexanderonline.org>]

On 2008-05-08 Thu, at 13:03, Carsten Dominik wrote:

>
> I am starting to like the idea.
>
>>

Wow, I've never felt so .... convincing before!

>> Thought-experiment: Should the VISIBILITY property be automatically  
>> inherited?
>
> I dont think so.  Better to make possible values for the visibility  
> that affect the entire tree below.  For example:
>
> folded
> children  (like the local "children" state)
> content   (like the global "content" state, but local tree only
> all
>
Yeah, that is clearly a much better idea.

To continue with that thought, may I suggest an additional value of  
'invisible'?

	invisible: this headline (and content) is folded into the preceding  
headline
	folded: this headline is visible, but the content under it is invisible

Perhaps there is better term for this. (What are those ellipses called  
now?) I would use 'invisible' for:
  1. calendar headlines in the recent past. Right now I use  
the :ARCHIVE: tag to prevent unfolding, but in after I sort in  
chronological order, I still get too many old things showing up at the  
top of the tree.  The down side is that then these items disappear  
from my agenda, where I sometimes scroll backwards to see what I did  
on that day.

  2. projects that are completed but not yet archived (for me,  
everything, as I haven't really gotten comfortable with moving  
subtrees around using the archive mechanism)

  3. reference headlines (phone number or booking confirmation  
numbers) that I don't need when planning, only while doing

I see myself going to my preset visibility (C-u C-u TAB) and looking  
at my tree in one window.  This would complement the agenda view,  
where doing something may require that phone number, and I have to hit  
TAB and get a split window.


Please don't hold this suggestion against having a visibility  
property ;-)

Next thought experiment: I suppose you'll have an immediate reaction  
on whether a descendant's  visibility setting should override the  
ancestor's or vice versa.

If I bury a task inside a calendar item (like my dad's birthday  
present in my original email), is it going to get shown (yeah!  
descendant's setting!) or not (boo!).

Alternatively if I've set a Project headline (always a 2nd level  
headline in my original file) to ':VISIBILITY: children' but then try  
to set ':VISIBILITY: folded' at the top level head while I focus on  
something other area of the file, am I going to see the Project and  
its children (boo!) or will it be invisibly merged into the ellipses  
of the ancestor? (Yeah! ancestor's setting!)

Having just written that, my vote is #1.  If I need to focus on  
something for the time being, I'll just use tab.  It'll always ignore  
the visibility property (curses!) ;-)

Hypothetically speaking.

-Ben