Hard indentation ​

It is possible to use hard spaces to achieve the indentation instead, if the bare ASCII file should have the indented look also outside Emacs[1]. With Org’s support, you have to indent all lines to line up with the outline headers. You would use these settings[2]:

emacs-lisp
(setq org-adapt-indentation t
      org-hide-leading-stars t
      org-odd-levels-only t)

Indentation of text below headlines (org-adapt-indentation) ​

The first setting modifies paragraph filling, line wrapping, and structure editing commands to preserving or adapting the indentation as appropriate.

Hiding leading stars (org-hide-leading-stars) ​

The second setting makes leading stars invisible by applying the face org-hide to them. For per-file preference, use these file ‘STARTUP’ options:

orgmode
#+STARTUP: hidestars
#+STARTUP: showstars

Odd levels (org-odd-levels-only) ​

The third setting makes Org use only odd levels, 1, 3, 5, …, in the outline to create more indentation. On a per-file level, control this with:

orgmode
#+STARTUP: odd
#+STARTUP: oddeven

To convert a file between single and double stars layouts, use M-x org-convert-to-odd-levels and M-x org-convert-to-oddeven-levels.

  1. This works, but requires extra effort. Org Indent mode is more convenient for most applications. ↩︎

  2. org-adapt-indentation can also be set to ‘'headline-data’, in which case only data lines below the headline will be indented. ↩︎