Straightforward Emacs: Show all unchecked Org Mode checkboxes
This is my first Straightforward Emacs blog post. Inspired by my video series, these posts will contain brief, descriptive write-ups of my favorite Emacs functions and features, problems I’ve solved, and short instructional guides. Many posts center on solving real world problems, especially with Org Mode, which I use to organize much of my work and personal life. I hope these posts will help you create and find solutions to your own problems.
Recently I was creating a packing list using Emacs’ Org Mode. I had multiple headings for each item category (clothing, toiletries, etc), with lists under each heading.
Figure 1: Part of my packing list.
Org sparse tree features are one way to make this search. But I decided to write a very small function using occur, allowing me to quickly generate an interactive list of all the unchecked checkboxes in a given Org file.
From EmacsWiki: Occur lists all lines of the current buffer that match a regexp that you give it.
Using occur, we can get something that looks like this:
Figure 2: Left pane: original packing list. Right pane: Occur buffer matching unchecked boxes.
What’s nice about Occur is that it’s interactive — you can easily jump to a line and make modifications.
You can manually achieve this result by running M-x occur and typing in the regex, but I wanted to bind this search to a key, so I wrote a very small function:
(defun jakebox/org-occur-unchecked-boxes ()
""
(interactive)
(occur "\\[ \\]")) ;; Match [ ]
Sure, there are more complex and comprehensive ways of doing things, but I like this function as an example of how a problem can be solved quickly and easily with Emacs. Someone with little programming knowledge could work their way around to a solution like this.