This post is just a friendly reminder that it may be a good idea to look in the manual from time to time, just in case there are some gems hidden there you don’t remember (even if you read it once).
It turns out that you can do a lot of things from the Org Agenda buffer. Usually, I just wander around that buffer using the normal movement commands and exit it using q. Of course, I also often mark things done using t and jump to them using RET. But until recently, that was about it.
It turns out Agenda can do a lot more. One nice thing is C-c C-o, which just opens the link from the selected entry (and displays a list of links found there first if there is more than one). f and b move forward and backward in time, and . gets back to today. A number of commands starting with v changes the appearance of the agenda, showing or hiding various kinds of information.
If you have a habit of not closing your agenda (e.g., with q), you might find M-<up> and M-<down> useful – they allow to rearrange the order of agenda entries, but only temporarily (until the agenda is (re)generated again).
If you want to reschedule your tasks, S-<right>, S-<left> and > may be for you.
You can also manage clocks (i.e., start and stop clocking etc.) from the agenda view.
One of the cooler things you can do in the agenda is bulk actions. You can mark more than one entry (manually or with a regex) and then perform some action on all marked entries. The available actions include manipulating todo state, tagging, archiving, scheduling/deadlining and refiling. You may also, as the manual puts is, “[r]eschedule randomly into the coming N days”, which I never used, but that looks cool. If that weren’t enough, defining custom actions is (of course) also possible, either on the fly or permanently.
Do yourself a favor and check out the manual, there are even more possibilities!
CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryOrgMode