Attempts to get around this problem cause more problems. For example, to avoid the clutter, I often end up making a target below a headline that is an exact copy of the headline text, like this:
* Correlation
* Mutual Information
<<Mutual Information>>
*** parametric
*** non-parametric
* Correntropy
When the top headlines are collapsed, the above looks like:
* Correlation
* Mutual Information
* Correntropy
This is cleaner than putting the target in the headline, which would look like this when collapsed:
* Correlation
* <<Mutual Information>>
* Correntropy
However, my redundant headline target is a maintenance mess (if you change the headline, you need to remember to change the target) and when the headline is expanded, things are even more cluttered.
So, here's my feature request: Hide the target angle brackets in the same way that square brackets are hidden for hyperlinks. In other words,
<<targets>> or <<<radio targets>>>
should be displayed as
targets and radio targets
where a unique font tells you that they are targets. The hidden angle brackets could be exposed by hitting delete when at the right side of the target (similar to how hidden hyperlink text is exposed now).
Code already exists to to do exactly this for [[hyperlinks]], and I thought that it would be easy to reuse it for hiding <<targets>>. But after several hours of digging around, I realized that this is a job for the experts. Is anyone interested in taking it on? I think it would be a big improvement.
Thanks everybody for all the excellent work on org-mode!
Scott