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org-du: Visualizing Org-mode Heading Sizes

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Update 2017-08-05: link to org-mind-map

Yesterday, I wrote my first Python 3 script which is a helper script to visualize sizes (number of lines) of Org-mode headings: org-du

I borrowed a different workflow from two GNU tools: Usually, the output of du (disk usage) is piped into xdu to visualize disk usage of directories. org-du mimics the output format of du in order to be able to use xdu to do the visualizing and navigational part.

Applying the script on the README.org file and piping the output into xdu looks like this:

 org-du.py README.org | xdu	  

You can navigate through the output via mouse, navigate back in the tree by clicking the leftmost column, and quit via q.

The script also accepts multiple Org-mode files as arguments. This way, you can get a brief overview of all of your Org data.

org-du works on any platform which runs Python 3. However, xdu is available on UNIX/GNU/Linux only. You can do the org-du part via org-du my-file.org > my-org-du-output.log on a Windows host, copy the result file to a GNU/Linux host and do the visualization part with xdu < my-org-du-output.log as well. This way, you can separate the data analysis and the data visualization part.

You can install org-du via sudo pip install org-du or clone from https://github.com/novoid/org-du

Have fun with this tool!

Update 2017-08-05: if you need to visualize the structure of your Org-mode file, you could check out org-mind-map.

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