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16.4.1 Org Indent Mode

To display the buffer in the indented view, activate Org Indent minor mode, using M-x org-indent-mode. Text lines that are not headlines are prefixed with virtual spaces to vertically align with the headline text1.

To make more horizontal space, the headlines are shifted by two characters. Configure org-indent-indentation-per-level variable for a different number.

By default, Org Indent mode turns off org-adapt-indentation and does hide leading stars by locally setting org-hide-leading-stars to t: only one star on each headline is visible, the rest are masked with the same font color as the background. If you want to customize this default behavior, see org-indent-mode-turns-on-hiding-stars and org-indent-mode-turns-off-org-adapt-indentation.

To globally turn on Org Indent mode for all files, customize the variable org-startup-indented. To control it for individual files, use ‘STARTUP’ keyword as follows:

#+STARTUP: indent
#+STARTUP: noindent
  1. Org Indent mode also sets wrap-prefix correctly for indenting and wrapping long lines of headlines or text. This minor mode also handles Visual Line mode and directly applied settings through word-wrap.↩