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2025-11-17

• 20:07 UTC (new) (history) 2025-11-17 Showing size of Org mode subtrees . . . . mbork – I’ve been using Org mode for way over 10 years now, and some of my Org files grew to a considerable size. My largest Org files are over 3 megabytes, which means that working with them tends to be a bit slow. I’d like to be able to check which parts of the Org file are the largest and which are smaller. With files on the disk, the classical tool to achieve this is du, along with its interactive counterparts like ncdu or the insanely fast gdu. I hoped for the existence of some kind of org-du which would do a similar thing with Org files. In fact, a tool with that name (written by the famous Karl Voit!) does exist, but it has three disadvantages which pretty much disqualify it for me: it counts lines instead of bytes, it is not working inside Emacs, and it is written in Python. Let’s write an org-du command which would work a bit like org-clock-display, that is, it would show the size of each subtree next to it using overlays.

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