org: Property inheritance
7.4 Property Inheritance
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The outline structure of Org mode documents lends itself to an
inheritance model of properties: if the parent in a tree has a certain
property, the children can inherit this property. Org mode does not
turn this on by default, because it can slow down property searches
significantly and is often not needed. However, if you find inheritance
useful, you can turn it on by setting the variable
‘org-use-property-inheritance’. It may be set to ‘t’ to make all
properties inherited from the parent, to a list of properties that
should be inherited, or to a regular expression that matches inherited
properties. If a property has the value ‘nil’, this is interpreted as
an explicit undefine of the property, so that inheritance search will
stop at this value and return ‘nil’.
Org mode has a few properties for which inheritance is hard-coded, at
least for the special applications for which they are used:
‘COLUMNS’
The ‘:COLUMNS:’ property defines the format of column view (
Column view). It is inherited in the sense that the level where
a ‘:COLUMNS:’ property is defined is used as the starting point for
a column view table, independently of the location in the subtree
from where columns view is turned on.
‘CATEGORY’
For agenda view, a category set through a ‘:CATEGORY:’ property
applies to the entire subtree.
‘ARCHIVE’
For archiving, the ‘:ARCHIVE:’ property may define the archive
location for the entire subtree (Moving subtrees).
‘LOGGING’
The LOGGING property may define logging settings for an entry or a
subtree (Tracking TODO state changes).
Info Catalog
org: Property searches
org: Properties and Columns
org: Column view