Emacs org-mode: refile using the goto-interface

Question

I often use the capture-refile-archive structure of org-mode but I have problem with the way the refiling works. I use IDO completion so that when I refile a tree Cc Cw I get all the possible trees to refile under in the mini-buffer.

However, this results in a huge number of possible completions that really aren't very readable. It would be far better if you could choose a refile file location and then use the org-goto-interface temporary buffer to choose a particular subtree.

Does anybody know how this could be done?

Answer 1

Perhaps the settings you are looking for are

(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)
(setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps t)

org-refile-use-outline-path lets you give the refile targets as paths ( file.org/heading/subheading ) and org-outline-path-complete-in-steps will pause after competing each stage of the path. Start refiling, type the path and press [tab] to get a list of all the top level headlines. Continue to the location you want.

Answer 2

You can do this by setting org-refile-targets before running org-refile . For example, I've described doing this for selecting and refiling to Org files that aren't in the global org-refile-targets . That was focused on having functions other than org-refile to handle special cases, but if you wanted org-refile to always ask for a buffer or file to refile to, you could advise org-refile to override org-refile-targets or you could set org-refile-targets to a function that returns a selected buffer.

(defun km/get-open-org-file ()
  (buffer-file-name
   (get-buffer
    (org-icompleting-read "Buffer: "
                          (mapcar 'buffer-name
                                  (org-buffer-list 'files))))))

(setq org-refile-targets '((km/get-open-org-file . (:maxlevel . 2))))

How exactly you set up org-refile-targets depends a lot on your work flow and structure for notes, but those examples hopefully give you an idea of how you can get things working the way you want.