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 text[1].

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:

orgmode
#+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. ↩︎