Re: Quicker refile? Capture & progress cookies. Using capture to count/tally

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Gez <suleika@gmail.com> writes:

> The second issue is one I have with capture all the time; I want the
> refile to be faster.  I have a few capture templates for logging that
> send to a particular headline, but most times I use capture the target
> can be anywhere in my main outlines.  As it is, I'm almost always
> finishing up with C-c C-w, and in effect starting from scratch each
> time, narrowing down to the target from all my agenda files.  I'd
> really like a template where once I've called it and entered text or
> tags or whatever, I use a single key press and the refile selection
> would begin with a file or headline pre-selected for quick further
> narrowing down. I don't know if that's do-able with IDO but I do
> imagine it could work with file+headline, file+olp etc. They would
> become file+headline+prompt etc and just as now, the template would
> determine which target was first suggested, but then it would still be
> "open" for quick further filtering before RET.    To summarise - my 2
> ideas are: 1. to add something like "+prompt" to refile selection in
> general, and 2. to allow capture templates with a "+prompt" target to
> use a single key to start the refile process.  I hope all this makes
> sense!

Hi Geraldine,

I almost exclusively use capture to quickly file away things I don't
want to forget.  This goes to my refile.org as a level 1 heading and
isn't attached to anything yet.

All of my tasks that need to be refiled show up on my block agenda view
in the second section - immediately under today's agenda view.  (see the
screen shot after the elisp at http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#sec-5-1)

I'm using this block agenda view regularly during the day and the tasks
to be refiled are constantly 'in my face' until I do something with
them.

I refile these items mostly from the agenda - I tend to get 2 or 3 of
them that are going to the same target so I'll mark them with 'm' and
refile with 'B r'.  My refile setup uses IDO completion for refile
targets and I find this works very well.  If I'm refiling to file x.org
under '* Tasks' I'll do something like C-c C-w x.org C-SPC tasks RET The
order of entering x.org/tasks doesn't matter - IDO is limiting the
targets to the entered data so I can match part of what is left in the
list.

This works great for me and makes refiling much faster then when I used
full paths/completion in steps.

I've also set up refiling to remove DONE tasks from the list of
available completion targets.  This helps prevent mistakes where you
refile to an already done tree (or if you have repeating separate tasks
with the same  name only the open ones show up as refile targets.)

My refile setup is described at
http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Refiling

The reason this works so well (for me) is I put off refiling the task
until I have a minute or two during the day to deal with it.  Normally
when I'm capturing a task I'm in the middle of something and I just want
to record whatever details I need and return to what I was doing as
quickly as possible.  Refiling the thing to the right place isn't
important right now so I put that off.  Constantly having to move things
to the right place as you capture them will be too slow IMHO.

Hope that helps,

Regards,
Bernt