org-tidy

🧹 An Emacs minor mode to automatically tidy org-mode property drawers.

Why?

Org-mode’s property drawer is a very useful feature. We can store properties associated with an entry in property drawer. I use org-roam every day. And org-roam node is an entry with ID property. But if I create many nodes in a single file, there will be a lot of property drawers. This is really annoying. Even after they are folded, there are still lines like :PROPERTIES: ... , which makes the whole buffer hard to read.

At first I googled for some tricks to hide property drawers completely. And I found there are many people like me who are bothered by this problem. Of course there are solutions. But these solutions involve a lot of code. So I made this package.

Screenshots

After org-tidy mode is turned on, these property drawers are hidden. And the symbol ♯ is appended after the headline. You can also customize how property drawers will be hidden.

Usage

Manual

(require 'org-tidy)
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'org-tidy-mode)

use-package

(use-package org-tidy
  :ensure t
  :hook
  (org-mode . org-tidy-mode))

How to edit property drawers in org-tidy-mode?

If you need to edit only one drawer temporarily, you can simply M-x org-tidy-untidy-buffer. When you save the buffer, it will be tidied again.

If you need to edit a lot of drawers, you can M-x org-tidy-toggle. Then the buffer will not be tidied on save, until M-x org-tidy-toggle again.

Customize

org-tidy-top-property-style How to display the property at the beginning of buffer. keep will do nothing. invisible will hide it.
org-tidy-properties-style How to display other property drawers.
- fringe will hide the property drawer and show a indicator in the left fringe
- inline will hide the property drawer and append a symbol (default to ♯) at the end of previous line
- invisible will just hide the property drawer
org-tidy-properties-inline-symbol The inline symbol.
org-tidy-property-drawer-flag Whether to tidy property drawers.
org-tidy-property-drawer-property-whitelist The whitelist of properties. If set, only property drawers which contain property in this list will be tidied.
org-tidy-property-drawer-property-blacklist Blacklist of properties. If set, property drawers which contain property in this list will not be tidied.
org-tidy-general-drawer-flag Non-nil means should tidy general drawers.
org-tidy-general-drawer-name-whitelist Whitelist of drawer names. If set, only general drawers whose name is in this list will be tidied.
org-tidy-general-drawer-name-blacklist Blacklist of drawer names. If set, general drawers whose name is in this list will not be tidied.