10.3.1 The weekly/daily agenda

The purpose of the weekly/daily agenda is to act like a page of a paper agenda, showing all the tasks for the current week or day.

C-c a a

Compile an agenda for the current week from a list of org files. The agenda shows the entries for each day. With a numeric prefix¹ (like C-u 2 1 C-c a a) you may set the number of days to be displayed (see also the variable org-agenda-ndays)

Remote editing from the agenda buffer means, for example, that you can change the dates of deadlines and appointments from the agenda buffer. The commands available in the Agenda buffer are listed in Agenda commands.

Calendar/Diary integration

Emacs contains the calendar and diary by Edward M. Reingold. The calendar displays a three-month calendar with holidays from different countries and cultures. The diary allows you to keep track of anniversaries, lunar phases, sunrise/set, recurrent appointments (weekly, monthly) and more. In this way, it is quite complementary to Org. It can be very useful to combine output from Org with the diary.

In order to include entries from the Emacs diary into Org mode's agenda, you only need to customize the variable

     (setq org-agenda-include-diary t)

After that, everything will happen automatically. All diary entries including holidays, anniversaries etc will be included in the agenda buffer created by Org mode. <SPC>, <TAB>, and <RET> can be used from the agenda buffer to jump to the diary file in order to edit existing diary entries. The i command to insert new entries for the current date works in the agenda buffer, as well as the commands S, M, and C to display Sunrise/Sunset times, show lunar phases and to convert to other calendars, respectively. c can be used to switch back and forth between calendar and agenda.

If you are using the diary only for sexp entries and holidays, it is faster to not use the above setting, but instead to copy or even move the entries into an Org file. Org mode evaluates diary-style sexp entries, and does it faster because there is no overhead for first creating the diary display. Note that the sexp entries must start at the left margin, no white space is allowed before them. For example, the following segment of an Org file will be processed and entries will be made in the agenda:

     * Birthdays and similar stuff
     #+CATEGORY: Holiday
     %%(org-calendar-holiday)   ; special function for holiday names
     #+CATEGORY: Ann
     %%(diary-anniversary 14  5 1956) Arthur Dent is %d years old
     %%(diary-anniversary  2 10 1869) Mahatma Gandhi would be %d years old

Appointment reminders

Org can interact with Emacs appointments notification facility.

To add all the appointments of your agenda files, use the command org-agenda-to-appt. This commands also lets you filter through the list of your appointments and add only those belonging to a specific category or matching a regular expression. See the docstring for details.