Re: [O] Dimming ancestors in the agenda (relevant to indenting nested TODOs in agenda views)

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Wed, Aug 24 2011, Samuel Wales wrote:

> Here is a different solution.  It is from my notes from long ago.
>
> To me, one issue with indenting is that you expect the previous line
> to be a direct parent, analogously with the outline.  This conflicts
> with sorting and non-child descendents.
>
> If you sort, you can't take advantage of the feature and have it look
> right.  If it's not a direct child, you can't take advantage of it
> either because you either confusingly indent too much or modify the
> semantics.  Also, indenting interferes with putting as much
> information on the line as possible.  Those with large fonts or small
> (e.g. mobile) displays value the real estate.
>
> ===
>
> Here is an alternate, which might or might not satisfy the OP's needs
> tangentially, but might spark discussion in either case.
>
> One feature I have long wanted, but have not been able to implement,
> is to dim (or color) any agenda entry that has a descendant in the
> same agenda view.
>
> ===
>
> This is a completely different thing from dimming blocked
> tasks, because it only looks at other tasks in the same
> view, and doesn't care about todo keywords.
>
> The pseudocode is this:
>
>   loop for i in all headlines in agenda (even a combined agenda)
>     if i has an ancestor in agenda, dim that ancestor
>

This is interesting, and certainly could be a potential display option.
It still sort of begs the question of how to get level and/or
child/ancestor information attached to the collected TODOs as they're
being produced for the agenda views.

I'm starting with the easiest use-case: attaching a "level" text
property to each TODO. I'm trying to do this for TODOs produced by
`org-todo-list' (used by the ?t and ?T dispatch commands) and
`org-tags-view' (used by the ?m and ?M dispatchers). The former employs
`org-agenda-get-day-entries' and then `org-agenda-get-todos' to find its
TODOs, the latter uses `org-scan-tags'.

I've put code into both `org-agenda-get-todos' and `org-scan-tags' that
attaches a "level" property to outgoing TODOs, and so far that's working
okay. A smarter thing to do would probably be attaching a "parent"
property that points to the parent headline. Different display options
could then use that information to munge the agenda display in different
ways: dimming, indenting, prefixing a path, etc.

Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud here! If the org gurus have any
pointers or warnings, that would be appreciated…

Eric