> Hi 42 (what's your other name?)

John is my real first name.

. . .

As for the rest, I didn't see some of the other replies, because the
org-mode mailing list moves a little two fast for my mailbox, and I prefer
to read selectively from the gmane archive.

That said, it is my responsibility to check that website before responding
to (some) of the messages that get forwarded to my e-mail address in a
thread I started.

Anyway, checking out some of the other solutions, since many were provided.
Thanks for the technical background on how headlines work in the code.

2013/2/5 Bastien <bzg@altern.org>
Hi 42 (what's your other name?)

42 147 <aeuster@gmail.com> writes:

> Maybe you could point me in the right direction; somewhere in the
> code, org-mode must be aware of the number of nested headlines in
> order for show-branches and show-children to work. Or maybe it is
> not.

It is not.  Long story short: folding a headline works by adding a
text overlay with the invisible property, and finding the end of the
overlay works by finding another headline of the same level.  So there
is no nothing of "jumping" by N subtrees.

Still, you can fetch the number of invisible headline in a folded
subtree *afterwards* -- I assumed this is what François' code does.

> In any case, I'd try and adapt the code to display a number
> indicating (1) position in the hierarchy; and (2) number of
> headlines at that / those position(s).

This could end up in a minor mode or simply a feature that people
could turn on and off.  But beware of the efficiency: with many
headlines, the folding features of Org combined with this feature
could become quite slow.

> Apologies if the original message was poorly articulated.

No problem, that's part of the game.

Thanks,

--
 Bastien