Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Now org-toggle-timestamp-overlays is Disabled

The default keybinding of org-todo is C-c C-t. Today I learned about another command with a similar keybinding (C-c C-x C-t) -- org-toggle-timestamp-overlays. Note the C-x in the middle.

When I pressed that key combination (inadvertently), all the YYYY-MM-DD timestamps in the buffer were converted to the MM/DD/YYYY format. This was unacceptable -- I needed to change them back. However undo did not revert the timestamps; it just undid the last edit. Furthermore, these undesired timestamps couldn't be edited and were impervious to org-shiftright. I was confused yet again.

I didn't even know how this happened. So I invoked view-lossage as a kind reader once suggested 1 and discovered org-toggle-timestamp-overlays.

The docstring was no help – it's self-evident that it would "Toggle the use of custom time stamp formats." Eager to clock out of my task, I didn't care to learn more. All I wanted to do was undo the effect.

I figured that since it toggles the timestamp, all I had to do was invoke it again to toggle it back. Nope. Well, a nice message appears, saying "Time stamp overlays removed." Yet the timestamps looked the same.

Undaunted, I figured I'd reload the buffer with org-mode-restart. That had no effect. To finally fix this, I deleted the buffer and revisited the file.

A command like this surely is in the same category as upcase-region, which is disabled by default. And so this is why I added (put 'org-toggle-timestamp-overlays 'disabled t) to my init file.

1 See https://ray-on-emacs.blogspot.com/2026/05/emacs-view-commands.html

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousOctober 1, 2026 at 2:46 PM

    Hi Ray, toggling works properly for me on emacs 30.2.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 2, 2026 at 12:45 AM

    Hi Ray, in my emacs 30.1 with org-mode 9.7.11 toggling the overlays back also didn't work. Luckily changing the timestamp overlay didn't change the original text, so my file still had the previous format. I tried in "emacs -Q" many things to remove the overlay, like (remove-overlays). Even "M-x revert-buffer" failed !? After Googling for halve an hour I got a fix: (with-silent-modifications (remove-text-properties (point-min) (point-max) '(display nil))). According to Google: The root of this problem stems from a major architectural overhaul introduced during the Org 9.7 release, combined with how Emacs 30 handles buffer modification notices. A related bug is https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2025-05/msg00203.html

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