Something you could discuss is the expectations that BeOrg has in the format of the Org files (if any).
Blank lines – I put in blank lines for readability. Will BeOrg remove them and where? Be precise.
Auto-fill – Should we fill paragraphs or let it wrap at the end of a line? I’m an old Emacs user, so I tend to turn on auto-fill.
CRLF vs NL – How does BeOrg hand EOL? If I mostly edit on a PC (CRLF), will that cause problems with BeOrg?
How is BeOrg on other character sets?
Anything else?
Doodle Cloud, 4 December 2018
Regarding blank lines beorg currently:
Removes any blank lines before a heading (this includes at the start of a file)
Keeps any blank lines after a heading
Keeps any blank lines in notes following a heading, except those before the next heading (this is the same as lines before a heading)
Auto-fill:
CRLF vs NL:
Other character sets:
If you see anything in your beorg usage which contradicts the above please let me know and I’ll investigate.
Great question, should be very useful for other users - thanks David!
Is it possible not to remove any blank lines in beorg? I would like to keep the formatting for readability.
Possibly - this is something I will need to review. What might be better is for users to override some simple formatting requirements in the init.org - for example how many blank lines after notes, before a headline, after a headline, etc. Then beorg could better keep things consistent when adding/removing items.
Good idea. By now I use beorg only with a dedicated org file because of the formatting, hope that you can put this idea into your wish list :)
Same issue here, after I modified some of my GTD items, some irrelevant parts of the the org file containing the items are also changed.
All I want is that, if I modified TODO item status only, only that relevant part will be changed, so that my original formatting will not be affected.
+1 for the option to not remove blank lines. I don’t want to use the app currently because it does that.
I will take a look to see if a new setting can be introduced to stop beorg messing with blank lines. For most users they would probably keep this on - but if you do you want to be in control of spacing, etc then I’ll see if beorg can be made to leave that alone.
Thanks. Glad to hear it.
I would love to hear if the setting is implemented or not? Seems it cannot be found in beorg3 or it is somewhere hided? :)
I have made some small improvements on this over the past few releases but still some work to do.
another +1 in favor of not removing blank lines. This creates all kinds of (apparently unnecessary?) churn for a workflow that syncs between my working org mode directory and iCloud.
Having a setting that only affects entries added in beorg, but not the entire file, sounds great to me.
thanks!
Another +1 for keeping blank lines
++
+1 Still very much waiting for this feature. It’s holding me back from using the app.
There is a new setting to add blank lines between headers. Add…
(set! beorg-add-newline-between-headlines #t)
…to your init.org. Possibly still not quite what some of you are looking for so hope to continue to make improvements here.
Thanks Matthew! Could you guide me to where init.org should be stored? Is it in the root org folder? I added it and the setting you posted, but the app doesn’t seem to respect spacing still. Anything I’m missing?
Check https://beorg.app/learning/excluding-tasks-from-specific-files-for-the-agenda-and-todo-lists/ for a guide on creating an init.org.
Oh! That’s a “set!, not “setl” !
I’d been using init to set the tag column as Emacs and Beorg disagree, but I recently noticed it wasn’t working and reset it in Emacs.
I’m also interested in keeping the formatting as found in the file. Not only blank lines but also the position of tags. I edit the raw file with a text editor sometimes and then prefer my own readability whitespacing.
@koen that would be unfortunately quite difficult to do with the way beorg is currently implemented. beorg reads in a file and parsing it into some internal data structures (e.g. it extracts the state, priority, headline text and tags as separate pieces of information) and then when a change is made it recreates the file. Potentially you could imagine an approach where any edits are made directly on the text, but this isn’t the approach taken by beorg. What is more likely is that there are hints to beorg that when writing the file it should follow a particular defined formatting.
There is currently one formatting setting in beorg which may be helpful to you - org-tags-column (this should work in a very similar way to the Emacs/Org mode equivalent).
I am currently seeing Beorg translate:
<2022-10-25 Tue 13:00-14:00>
into:
<2022-10-25 Tue 13:00>–<2022-10-25 Tur 14:00>
Why?
Currently beorg’s understanding of time/date ranges isn’t quite right. I need to update beorg to differentiate between a time range and an explicitly expressed start and end date.
