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Drive unsurpassed top-level trees when performing tag searches in Emacs Org mode

Over the past year and a half, I have kept a monolithic buffer in Org Mode for my technical notes with my current employer. Despite the fact that it contains mainly pointers to other documents, this file has become quite large by human standards (48,290 lines of text), remaining trivially searchable and editable using software tools (reading: grep and searching for tags in Org mode )

One thing bothers me. When I search for tags using Org Mode 6.33x , the Org sparse tree view saves the folded view of the mismatched trees in the buffer (that is, the content preceded by one asterisk *). This is usually useful for small buffers or those that are better organized into a single tree with multiple branches. However, this does not work very well for documentation, where each new tree is generated chronologically, one for each day, as I did.

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Before continuing, I would like to note that my workaround is inherent in what I just asked, as well as the obvious changes in my documentation habits with this buffer. However, the following questions remain:

1) Why does Org mode organize trees this way when you do a sparse tag search? Technical details are self-explanatory, UX solutions are smaller.

2) If I wanted to fix this problem with a script written in Emacs Lisp, which hooks and commands should be studied in more detail to restructure the look of the document? Writing overrides for standard commands (e.g. org-match-sparse-tree ) is already self-evident.

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Thanks in advance.

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As you already noticed, the problem affects only top-level headers. It's good that in org mode, you can easily lower all the headers with simple keystrokes. This way you can avoid the problem. After that, cleaning up is just a few simple keystrokes.

Step by step instructions:

  • Mark full buffer
  • Call M-right (for outline-demote )
  • Entering * root\n at the beginning of the file
  • Now create your subtree and do what you want with it.
  • When done, you can remove * root\n at the beginning of the file and re-enable the headers with M-left

I got the impression that you can even leave a general heading where it is designed for your application.

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