Hello all,
I was trying to track down the source of a bug encountered when I was
submitting my last patch about org-columns. I'm going to walk you
through my thought process and summarize at the end. As part of my
experimenting, I did the following:
1. emacs -Q
2. open a new buffer at "/tmp/test.org"
3. Add a headline (something like "* test"), and run org-columns only be
greeted by an unexpected error: "Non-existent agenda file
/tmp/test.org. [R]emove from list or [A]bort?"
It's clear that /tmp/test.org is not part of the agenda since it's a
brand new file, but I was surprised that org-columns cares at all.
Pressing "R" to remove it from the list tells the user that it wasn't in
the agenda list (as you'd expect) and then continues to display columns
as expected, which made me wonder why it is doing that at all. This
issue only appears though when /tmp/test.org is not saved to disk, which
looks like expected behaviour as per the following.
I looked into what's going on, and it relates to org-map-entries, which
builds a list of what is in the buffer. org-map-entries calls
org-agenda-prepare-buffers. This checks whether the given files are
actual files or not and opens them up if they are. This makes sense I
believe from an org-agenda perspective since it has to make sure all of
the files are open in order to return a list of the headlines, but for
org-columns it does not. org-columns is an interactive function that is
only run on the current buffer, so the buffer should always be open.
org-map-entries has a lot of different paths in it based on the
parameters, but essentially the call from org-columns does two things:
1) call org-agenda-prepare-buffers and 2) sets "res" to the output of
org-scan-tags. I believe that the former is unnecessary and that the
latter is the only necessary code to run in this instance.
To summarize: I've attached a patch to this that makes a change to this.
It replaces org-map-entries with a call instead to org-scan-tags. This
fixes the bug I noted above, and I believe (if I'm using the profiler
correct), makes org-columns a bit faster since it's not calling a bunch
of functions that doesn't matter to its output. As far as I can tell, my
patch works as expected with no obvious behaviour changes. All of the
tests continue to pass as well. I've tested it on my own files and it is
working as expected as well.
I'd appreciate any feedback on this, or if there are edge cases that the
removed code breaks that I haven't been able to identify.
Nick
>From f8425ef6fe0ae59c9c4df0b71f3cb61c7bc7e975 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nicholas Savage <n...@nicksavage.ca>
Date: Mon, 3 May 2021 08:49:11 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] org-colview.el (org-columns): Replace org-map-entries with
org-scan-tags
* lisp/org-colview.el (org-columns): Replace call to `org-map-entries'
to build cache with `org-scan-tags'.
Simplifies `org-columns' to call `org-scan-tags' instead of
`org-map-entries'. This is to fix a bug where an unexpected non-existent
agenda file error was thrown if the buffer that `org-columns' was called
on was not yet saved to disk. This also simplifies `org-columns' and
prevents unnecessary agenda preparation functions from running.
---
lisp/org-colview.el | 16 +++++++---------
1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
diff --git a/lisp/org-colview.el b/lisp/org-colview.el
index 517bcdf1c..ac3fd9326 100644
--- a/lisp/org-colview.el
+++ b/lisp/org-colview.el
@@ -836,12 +836,11 @@ Also sets `org-columns-top-level-marker' to the new position."
(defun org-columns (&optional global columns-fmt-string)
"Turn on column view on an Org mode file.
-Column view applies to the whole buffer if point is before the
-first headline. Otherwise, it applies to the first ancestor
-setting \"COLUMNS\" property. If there is none, it defaults to
-the current headline. With a `\\[universal-argument]' prefix \
-argument, turn on column
-view for the whole buffer unconditionally.
+Column view applies to the whole buffer if point is before the first
+headline. Otherwise, it applies to the first ancestor setting
+\"COLUMNS\" property. If there is none, it defaults to the current
+headline. With a `\\[universal-argument]' prefix \ argument, GLOBAL,
+turn on column view for the whole buffer unconditionally.
When COLUMNS-FMT-STRING is non-nil, use it as the column format."
(interactive "P")
@@ -867,9 +866,8 @@ When COLUMNS-FMT-STRING is non-nil, use it as the column format."
(let ((cache
;; Collect contents of columns ahead of time so as to
;; compute their maximum width.
- (org-map-entries
- (lambda () (cons (point) (org-columns--collect-values)))
- nil nil (and org-columns-skip-archived-trees 'archive))))
+ (org-scan-tags
+ (lambda () (cons (point) (org-columns--collect-values))) t org--matcher-tags-todo-only)))
(when cache
(org-columns--set-widths cache)
(org-columns--display-here-title)
--
2.20.1
