11 Agenda Views

Due to the way Org works, TODO items, time-stamped items, and tagged headlines can be scattered throughout a file or even a number of files. To get an overview of open action items, or of events that are important for a particular date, this information must be collected, sorted and displayed in an organized way.

Org can select items based on various criteria and display them in a separate buffer. Six different view types are provided:

• an agenda that is like a calendar and shows information for specific dates,
• a TODO list that covers all unfinished action items,
• a match view, showings headlines based on the tags, properties, and TODO state associated with them,
• a text search view that shows all entries from multiple files that contain specified keywords,
• a stuck projects view showing projects that currently do not move along, and
• custom views that are special searches and combinations of different views.

The extracted information is displayed in a special agenda buffer. This buffer is read-only, but provides commands to visit the corresponding locations in the original Org files, and even to edit these files remotely.

By default, the report ignores commented (see Comment Lines) and archived (see Internal archiving) entries. You can override this by setting org-agenda-skip-comment-trees and org-agenda-skip-archived-trees to nil.

Two variables control how the agenda buffer is displayed and whether the window configuration is restored when the agenda exits: org-agenda-window-setup and org-agenda-restore-windows-after-quit.