On April 1, 2017 10:57:41 PM GMT+05:30, Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> wrote:
>Org-mode has nearly everything that other outlining tools have, and
>generally much, much more. But one thing that is missing (and
>there's been sporadic traffic about this) is convenient
>scatter-gather. BrainStorm WFO has this; it's not like I'm going to
>start using it as an alternative, but such a feature might be nice in
>org-mode.
>
>The Emacs way is to write it yourself, and I'm thinking about that. But
>I wanted to try out the concept and see if it's of interest, or for
>that
>matter, more trouble than it's worth.
>
>You can do something like this on the Agenda screen, but that's not a
>general solution at all. What about an "ordinary" org mode file. So
>here's the flow I envision.
>
>1. You "mark" a series of headline entries with, say,
>   'org-sg-mark'. Perhaps it would look like this when marked:
>   
>   ** ! interesting headline
>
>   Yes, this disturbs the existing text. But the marking has to be
>   somehow visual.
>
>2. You give a command like 'org-sg-gather' and the marked headlines are
>   gathered up, moved (just like archiving) to a file (for which you're
>   prompted) or maybe, optionally to the top or bottom of the current
>   buffer. The marks are then cleared.
>
>3. 'org-sg-clear' clears a single mark; 'org-sg-clear-all' clears them
>all.
>
>Potential problems:
>
>1. As mentioned, text is disturbed at least temporarily.
>
>2. Incomplete operation sequences leave marks in place, when they might
>   be useless.
>
>3. If the gathered headlines are at different levels, the resulting
>  gathered outline will not be sensible and will require manual fixing.
>
>Comments welcome. This doesn't look especially difficult to code, but
>does it make sense and is it of any use?
>
>-- 
>Bob Newell
>Honolulu, Hawai`i
>* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *

What is scatter-gather ? What is the purpose for which it is done? Google tells me about a vectored I/O method, which is not what i guess you are talking about.

That would help clarify why you chose an org-syntax demolishing "!"  instead of a tag.

For myself i have coded a dirty elisp to extract and randomly order some specific marked headlines. But for this, tags work better because i don't want to mark all my headlines (hundreds) every time i dump this out.