Re: New feature? Remove duplicate subheadings, preserving order

[Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>]

Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com> writes:

> There be dragons.
>
> The problem is that some things happen invisibly and far away from
> where you are, so you don't know about it and you don't find out for a
> couple of weeks.  Undo and automatic backups are useless in that case.
>
> That *has* happened: there have been multiple postings in the ML about
> such problems. Whenever it has happened, the devs have always modified
> org to make it safer: that is the prudent thing to do and the correct
> course of action IMO.
>
> Hell hath no fury like an orgmode user who lost part of his/her
> precious org file because of an errant keystroke a month ago and was
> not aware of the loss until it was too late.

Indeed.  Maybe I'm just paranoid, but having worked with Org code a bit,
I still wonder sometimes if I have ever accidentally wiped out a subtree
without noticing.  Would I ever notice that it's missing?  Even if it's
stored in git or a backup, how can I restore something that I don't know
needs restoring?

Some of this is simply the nature of computers, I think--a keystroke
here, a blink of the eye there, and poof, the data is gone.  If the
point is in one buffer when my fingers press C-c C-x C-w, but my eyes
are in another buffer, does the subtree still get deleted?  :)

And despite how great Emacs and Org are, this is one area in which their
power may make them more vulnerable to such issues.  Their use of global
state and special variables also makes unintended consequences easier to
achieve.

This is why I think we should always be very careful.  Org is nothing if
we can't trust it to keep our data safe!  :)