Is there a way to copy the table presented in "column view" as raw text?
1 Answer
As mentioned in my comment, you should look at the Capturing column view section of the Org manual for additional details, but doing
M-x org-insert-columns-dblock RET global RET
should give you a good beginning.
E.g. given this file:
TODO foo
foo
* TODO bar
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2020-03-05 Thu 07:44]
:END:
bar
if you position the cursor at the end of the file and do M-x org-insert-columns-dblock RET global RET you will get this:
* TODO foo
foo
* TODO bar
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2020-03-05 Thu 07:44]
:END:
bar
#+BEGIN: columnview :hlines 1 :id global
| ITEM | TODO | PRIORITY | TAGS |
|------+------+----------+------|
| foo | TODO | B | |
|------+------+----------+------|
| bar | TODO | B | |
#+END:
If you then change the file (e.g. add another heading), you can update the dynamic block with M-x org-update-dblock or just C-c C-c on the #+BEGIN: line of the block.
column-viewusing a variation of the code in the following link, but the code "as is" extracts the raw data used to create a standard*Org Agenda*buffer based upon the let-bound settings of the code: emacs.stackexchange.com/a/12563/2287 I have not tried out the code with recent versions oforg-mode, but I would imagine the same principle will still work. Perhaps you can adapt that to suit your needs to extract the text that would otherwise go into acolumn-view. The raw data will containtext-properties(with more data) that can also be extracted.