I did one of those periodic, empty your mind sessions today.
Everything is now in a brain dump org file.
And now, like a every good productivity system preaches, I want to review the dump periodically.
There is a task for my miscellenea for e.g. Could I convert it to a link and have it open the file at that precise location?
Turns out Org Mode links let me do just that.
All I need to do, is first store a link in Org parlance. I do that by going to my target file that has the dump (the bottom file in the screenshot), go to the section that I need linking to (in my case, Misc Brain Dump), and hit C-c l


After which I go to the file which needs to contain my link, and select my text that I’ll want converted into a link (inserting a link in org speak. In my case, the top file in the screenshot below).
I select the Misc Brain Dump part of the “Look at the Misc Brain Dump” task and hit
C-c C-l
It then switches me to a buffer that shows the links that Org currently has stored, with the minibuffer prompting me to choose one


I use the arrow keys to choose the one I want, hit return and it creates the link for me.


Here, I’ve switched away from my brain dump. (I’ve closed the file in fact)

I click the link in my tasks file and …


It opens right up, at the exact location I want. Woohoo!

And just like everything else with Org, it’s plain, simple, elegant, text functionality.
I examined the link and it was a borg standard Org link, with the link having the header tacked on the end, like so …
file:brain-dump.org::*Misc Brain Dump1


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  1. which should have been evident when I chose the link to insert, but I only saw it and went Aha! much later 😂 ↩︎