On 2015-05-13 Wed 03:40, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de> writes:
>
>> Capturing, refiling, and archiving all create a new entry at a target
>> location.  Yet each of these facilities has it’s own way to specify the
>> target.  Capture templates have the most powerful target specification
>> and refiling and archiving are both fairly limited.  For users that is
>> confusing and it prevents them from getting the most out of org-mode.  Is
>> there a technical reason for why different target specifications are
>> used or is it just historical?  Wouldn’t it make sense to use just one
>> target specification “language” and to use that everywhere?
>
> Would you mind elaborating? What, exactly, are you suggesting?

The specification format used for capture templates seems to be the most
expressive.  I was wondering if it would make sense to use that also
for refiling targets and for archiving targets.  Specifically, I’d like
to be able to say things like this:

  (setq org-refile-targets
    '(((file+olp my-agenda-file "Agenda" "Finished") :prepend t)
      ((file+olp my-agenda-file "Agenda" "Urgent") :prepend t)))

and

  (setq org-archive-location
    '((file+olp my-agenda-file "Agenda" "Finished") :prepend t))

The reason why I think this would be useful is that some simple things
are currently not possible.  Consider the following document structure:

  * Office
  ** To do
  ** Finished
  * Home
  ** To do
  ** Finished

If I want to archive things under the “Agenda/Finished,” there is no way
to achieve this (correct me if I’m wrong).  I could try this

  (setq org-archive-location "::** Finished")

but that is ambiguous.  It doesn’t indicate which of the two “Finished”
nodes should be the target.

Similar problems exist for refile targets: if I want to have the first
“Finished” in my targets but not the second, how would I achieve that?
None of the available facilities allows me to do this (without changing
the document structure).

Using the capture template way of specifying targets, both problems
would be easy to solve because that mechanism allows me to specify the
complete path in the document tree leading to the node of interest
(among other things, file+regexp, etc.)

  Titus