Re: Restricting the agenda to the current subtree

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

Carsten Dominik wrote:
> On 11/23/07, Rick Moynihan <rick@calicojack.co.uk> wrote:
>> I've just discovered that you can restrict the agenda view to the
>> current subtree, and I think I'm going to find this very useful!
>>
>> Firstly is it possible to bind this to a simple key-chord though as I'm
>> finding
>>
>> C-a < < a
>>
>> A little unwieldy.
>>
>> Also, how about implementing another "follow" command, that does the
>> opposite of following movements in the agenda view and displaying them
>> in the file.  i.e. When enabled it uses the org-goto interface to follow
>> movements within the file and display the restricted agenda view in
>> another window.
>>
>> This could also be coupled with other queries defined in the agenda yet
>> would narrow their focus to the currently browsed subtree.
>>
>> I'm not sure if it's a crazy idea or not but I think it might be useful.
> 
> 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.

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 usind 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.


R.