Nicolas Martyanoff has a nifty post that discusses some tips for dealing with Org headlines. There are actually three tips but I adopted only two of them. The first involves what happens when you type Ctrl+Return on a headline. By default, it will start a new headline wherever the point is. By setting org-insert-heading-respect-content to t the new headline will be inserted after the current headline and its associated content. It seems to me that this is what you’d always want but it’s not the default.
In the past, I’ve avoided using Ctrl+Return to open a new headline because it messed up my current content. With this change it does the right thing so it’s definitely worth knowing.
The second tip involves another feature I’ve never really understood and never used: org-goto (bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+j by default). The default action is to open another buffer with some confusing instructions but if you set org-goto-interface to 'outline-path-completion you just get a nice completing list providing you’re using some sort of completion framework. You’ll also need to disable org-outline-path-complete-in-steps, which you’ve probably already done if you’re using a completion package.
Once those changes are in place, org-goto will get you a list of your headlines with the usual fuzzy search capabilities. This make org-goto really useful, especially for big files with lots of headlines such as my list of blog posts and notes.
The third tip involves not highlighting the entire line of TODO headings. I use org-fontify-done-headline to set DONE headlines to a different color so I don’t need this tip. Even before I discovered org-fontify-done-headline, I was never bothered by having the entire headline the same color as the TODO keyword but your mileage may vary so do what works for you. As usual, Emacs lets you have it your way.
This is a short post but it has a lot of good information in it. Definitely worth a few minutes of your time.