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 ser ies 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 welco me. This doesn't look especially difficult to code, but
does it make sense and is it of any use?

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.