Weight of headers

[pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard)]

Hello, all Org friends.

Here is a need I have once in a while, but for which I do not even have
realistic suggestions to offer (at least, so I feel).  Maybe someone
would offer more precise ideas. :-)

When I have a big Org file which I want to re-organize, one of the
criteria I use is to manage the overall plan, always keeping a logical
organization of things of course, and move things around so top-level
headers become of comparable weights.  By "weight", I mean the amount of
contents, which is a fuzzy concept (it could be measured as the number
of sub-headers or sub-items, the depth of structure, or even the raw
number or lines or characters).

It may look strange, but this is not so bizarre after all.  When reading
a book, it is unusual to have a chapter having one page next to a
chapter having hundreds of page; we expect that the effort of reading a
chapter is not widely different from the effort of reading another.  In
the same way, if I decide to tackle the topics under a header, I would
expect that the energy needed somehow announces the energy that would be
required to handle another level at the same level.  Of course, there
could be quite a variance, but nevertheless, I would like to keep that
variance within bounds.

And recursively!  The same way I would like to work an weight
equilibrium for top-level headers, I would like to do the same for the
sub-headers of a given header.

My need here is to get an estimate of the weight of displayed headers.
I could of course expand the whole document and page through to get an
idea, but at least in the document I'm currently handling, I'm just
overwhelmed.  (This is not the only document triggering this in me, I
remember having felt that need many times when I was using WorkFlowy).

I once thought that colors could encode the weight, but it just would
not fit Org mode so far that I understand it.  However, it seems that,
here and there, Org uses some overly magic to display extra information
-- for example, like with `C-c C-x C-d (`org-clock-display')'.  Maybe
that some similar machinery could be use to display header weights?  Or
maybe this would be overkill, because there are simpler ways which I
just do not know?

François