One Hundred Times the Highest Priority

In the previous post,¹ I was disappointed to learn that valid priority characters are limited to 0–9 and A–Z. I thought it would be neat if the exclamation mark ("!") could represent the ultimate priority, a sort of "drop everything and do this immediately" kind of priority.

It turns out that you can use "!" for this purpose, regardless of which priority characters you've configured. The trick is to write a function and assign it to org-priority-get-priority-function.

The function (which I named org-get-cust-priority) simply looks for "!" in the priority cookie and returns one hundred times the value that would be returned by the highest valid priority. If it doesn't find "!" it simply calls a modified version of the usual org-get-property function,² which I named org-get-std-priority. The two functions are shown below.³

(defun org-get-cust-priority (s)
  "Return 100 times the highest priority when S contains
a priority cookie with `!'.  Otherwise call the usual
`org-get-property' function. Intended to be assigned to
`org-priority-get-priority-function'."
  (interactive)
  (if (not (functionp org-priority-get-priority-function))
      (org-get-std-priority s)
    (string-match ".*?\\(\\[#\\(!\\)\\] ?\\)" s)
    (if (string-equal (match-string 2 s) "!")
        (* 100000 (abs (- org-priority-lowest org-priority-highest)))
      (org-get-std-priority s))))

(defun org-get-std-priority (s)
  "Find priority cookie and return priority.
S is a string against which you can match `org-priority-regexp'.
Same function as `org-get-priority' sans test for a custom
function in `org-priority-get-priority-function'."
  (save-match-data
    (if (not (string-match org-priority-regexp s))
        (* 1000 (- org-priority-lowest org-priority-default))
      (* 1000 (- org-priority-lowest
                 (org-priority-to-value (match-string 2 s)))))))

The number that Org uses to sort on priority depends on the values of org-priority-lowest and org-priority-highest,⁴ which are "C" and "A" by default. In the default configuration, the highest priority has a numeric value of 2000, while the lowest has a value of 0. If the highest and lowest priority characters are 1 and 9, respectively, the highest priority has a value of 8000.

You know you need this if you have about a dozen items on your agenda and half of them are prioritized A.

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¹ https://ray-on-emacs.blogspot.com/2026/07/numeric-priorities-in-org-mode.html
² Modified just to prevent recursion.
³ I know this code isn't particuarly elegant. I could have made custom variables for "!" and the priority multiplier, for example. I'd like to use it for a while before deciding whether it's worth investing any more effort. I do welcome suggestions on how to improve.
⁴ Or rather, the difference between the highest and lowest priorities.

Numeric Priorities in Org Mode

Org mode is configured "out-of-the-box" with these three levels of priority: A, B, C, where A is the highest priority. However, this can be changed. You can use numbers to indicate priority, such as 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest) as shown in the documentation.¹

If you specify priorities from 65 to 90, Org will interpret the numbers as ordinal values of ASCII characters and give you "A" to "Z." If you try to be clever and specify priorities as 65 to 91 (91 is the decimal ASCII code for left square bracket character) you'll be disappointed that when you lower the priority from "Z," you don't get "[." (I was disappointed, anyway.)

You can define priorities from 10 to 99, for example. But if you try to get to a priority higher than 10 using org-priority-up, Org will clear the priority cookie. However, you can manually enter a priority of 0 to ensure the item appears above all other items. (Please see Figure 1, below.) Thus, a priority value of 0 can be your "stat" item. It would be super neat if Org could understand that ASCII characters below 0 (such as the exclamation mark) are an even higher priority than 0. Unfortunately, it doesn't even recognize [#!] as a priority cookie.

A large priority span seems like it would be useful. For example, you might have all utility bills set from 50 to 59, and shopping for birthday or anniversary gifts from 10 to 19. However, in order to go from a priority of 50 to 10, you'd have to press the Up Arrow key forty times. If you think you can invoke M-4 0 M-x org-priority-up to go quickly from 50 to 10, you'll be disappointed (again). The function org-priority-up doesn't accept a prefix argument.²

How do you use priority in Org?

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¹ Org Manual -- Priorities

² But you can record a macro that consists of a single S-<up> key press and then play it back with a prefix argument of 39.

Configure Web Browser to be More Emacs-like

Emacs, LibreOffice Writer and Vivaldi are the productivity tools I use most often. So I like to incorporate a feature from one into the others. One example is the ability to initiate a search from selected text. I added this feature to LibreOffice as described here. Another nice feature is the ability to switch between the current buffer and the next (or previous) buffer with C-<TAB> and C-S-<TAB> that I added to Emacs¹.

But I've also configured Vivaldi with a useful Emacs feature. Now it responds to C-S-k by invoking "Close tabs to the Right." Emacs devotees know that C-k is bound to kill-line, which "Kill[s] the rest of the current line...."² If you imagine that the row of tabs is a line of text, it's natural to expect C-k (or C-S-k) would remove all the tabs to the right of the current tab.

Why did I choose the key combination C-S-k instead of C-k? I think at the time C-k performed another function. Or perhaps I felt that it was more appropriate to use two modifier keys for such a significant operation. I rarely need to delete tabs to the left; if I did, I'd bind C-M-S-k to "Close tabs to the Left."

You might utter the following complaint, "But C-S-k doesn't work for Gmail; it brings up a virtual keyboard instead!" Correct. So while we're on the topic of Vivaldi key configurations, I'd like to point out that it's possible to tell Vivaldi to ignore a website's key assignment, allowing the key to pass to Vivaldi. Just search for the setting "Browser Priority Shortcuts," click on one of the existing key combinations and press C-S-k to add it to the others.

I rely on the web browser's tab history a great deal, too. I'm working on implementing something vaguely similar for Emacs."

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¹ To get the C-<TAB> and C-S-<TAB> to switch buffers, just add this to your init file:

  (keymap-global-set "C-<tab>" 'next-buffer)
  (keymap-global-set "C-S-<tab>" 'previous-buffer)

² https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Killing-by-Lines.html