Suggestion: Jump points

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

Carsten Dominik wrote:
> 
> On Jul 6, 2007, at 18:28, Rick Moynihan wrote:
> 
>> Agreed.  My gut feeling is that they fulfill largely different 
>> purposes.  The problem is that I tend to make a decision to structure 
>> something with lists & checkboxes, and later on discover I want an 
>> item in the list to appear inside the agenda.
> 
> In such a case I usually make the headline above the checkbox
> list a TODO and have that show up in the agenda.  From there
> it is only one or two TAB presses to the checkboxes.
> 
> - Carsten

I too have tried this, but it means if you start editing your lists (and 
if they're numbered) the list numbers get reset which can be annoying.

I sometimes have quite long lists within outlines, and I guess the 
problem is that I know what project I want to work on yet I want to 
quickly find the item within it which I'd previously identified as 
tackling next.  Sometimes when returning to such a list it takes me a 
while to figure out which task I was supposed to tackling next.

So here's a suggestion.  Why not support jump points (or jump lines), 
which would be essentially be a syntactic marker that would tell 
org-mode to jump to a specific line within an outline when visiting from 
the agenda e.g. via follow mode.

* My main project outline.
   blah blah blah...
   ...

   - [ ] do something
   - [ ] do this ++
   - [ ] do something else
   ...

I'm not too bothered about the syntax, but here the ++ indicates the 
line which the point should be placed on within that outline.

Some simple interactive commands could be written to reset the jump 
point to a new line within that outline.  This would simply remove any 
existing jump-point and insert a new one at the point.  Naturally this 
command might want to alert you about jump-point removal, and if there 
were multiple points (accidentally) defined within a single outline it 
might warn you of this, perhaps moving you into an interactive mode to 
clean them up and set the point to where you wanted.

Is this something people might find useful?  I personally find I spend a 
lot of time trying to re-acquire my previous context within a particular 
task, something like this might help.

Actually, after thinking about this; I realise that Emacs has bookmarks 
(a feature I've not yet put to use) perhaps a better idea would be to 
integrate these with org-mode and visiting the file via the agenda?

What do people think?

R.