This page collects suggestions and practices to keep your Org files tidy.
Filing away content that is no longer needed is probably the most effective way to cleanup and tidy your Org files: See archiving.
Tags and properties are examples of Org data that is both read by users and processed by Org itself. It is possible for Org to find and remove unused pieces of metadata automatically:
- Remove empty property drawers
- Remove redundant tags
- Ensure DEADLINE/SCHEDULED timestamps are placed correctly
- Clean up entry IDs
You already know org-id which comes with Org: It allows you to add
unique IDs to your nodes, which e.g. are used in links and allow easy
navigation within Org files.
If a user tends to delete those links without deleting the IDs the links refer to, unused IDs (with no link pointing at them) will be left over.
In general this is not a problem for org-id, and no intervention is
required. However, if the user produces hundreds or thousands of such
unreferenced IDs, this might eventually start to slow down org-id,
especially its function org-id-update-id-locations.
In such a situation org-id-cleanup may come in handy. It provides an interactive assistant that guides you through the process of finding and eventually deleting such unused IDs.
org-id-cleanup can be tried whithout hesitation: Before each step it
gives detailed information so that you may bail out at will. And as a
safety net, a log of removed IDs is saved to disk.
org-id-cleanup is available at MELPA.