How to fully expand an org item's tree branch when visiting it from an agenda view?

Question

When I am in an org agenda view and use something like org-agenda-goto on an item, the org buffer is opened with a minimal tree expansion, with both parents and children concealed with ... above and below. I could find no easy way to fully expand the branch without fully expanding the whole tree.

I would like to see the whole tree branch when I visit an item from the agenda. Preferably I would be able to control whether I only want to see parents or children fully expanded.

Is this possible with standard org mode, or does it require writing elisp?

Answer 1

To reveal more context around a given headline, use org-reveal.

To change the default context level, customize the variable org-show-context-detail. You can set different contexts to different visibility spans (or "detail levels"). Customize the agenda context and set its visibility span to tree.

Alternatively, set the org-show-context-detail variable to t in your .emacs and restart your emacs: that will set all contexts to have the "canonical" visibility span.

C-h v org-show-context-detail RET will show you the docstring for the variable, which is always a useful thing to do. You might want to experiment with different values of visibility spans for the various contexts.