Hi all,
If anyone out there makes heavy use of categories and is sick of going through org-sort-property and org-delete-property to handle them, here's a pair of conveience functions for directly manipulating categories. It's a pity that emacs doesn't seem to support partially applying an interactive function and then having it interactively prompt for the remaining arguments. That would make org-set-category as short as org-delete-category. Moset of the code is copied from org-set-property's interactive definition, and then modified.
-Ryan
(defun org-set-category (property value)
"In the current entry, set category to VALUE.
When called interactively, this will prompt for a value, offering
completion either on allowed values (via an inherited xxx_ALL
property) or on existing values in other instances of this
property in the current file."
(interactive
(let* ((completion-ignore-case t)
(prop "CATEGORY")
(cur (org-entry-get nil prop))
(allowed (org-property-get-allowed-values nil prop 'table))
(existing (mapcar 'list (org-property-values prop)))
(val (if allowed
(org-completing-read "Value: " allowed nil 'req-match)
(let (org-completion-use-ido org-completion-use-iswitchb)
(org-completing-read
(concat "Value " (if (and cur (string-match "\\S-" cur))
(concat "[" cur "]") "")
": ")
existing nil nil "" nil cur)))))
(list prop (if (equal val "") cur val))))
(unless (equal (org-entry-get nil property) value)
(org-entry-put nil property value)))
(defun org-delete-category ()
"Delete the category of the current item."
(interactive)
(org-delete-property "CATEGORY"))