Use Org mode long enough and invariably you'll get around to using Agenda views to manage your defined tasks. Agenda views have become core to my Emacs experience and I'm certain that I'm not alone in saying this. As with other packages, there's a steep learning curve to using Agenda views, largely because Org adopts the Emacs convention of using keybindings and the mini-buffer prompt as its primary user interface with an added twist of frequently making this behavior conditional on where the point is.

To help ease using Agenda views, I'm happy to announce Casual Agenda, a Transient user interface for Org Agenda available on MELPA today.

Casual Agenda organizes the Agenda view commands into the following sections:

• Agenda - Modify the view duration (day, week, month, year).
• Filter - Filter displayed headlines with different criteria.
• Actions - Perform an activity on a headline, create/capture a headline, or even generate a different agenda view.
• Navigation - move the point to where you want it to be.
• Utils - Set a timer, get almanac info.

Note that all the menus in Casual Agenda are contextual so as one navigates the Agenda view, the menu items will be enabled as appropriate.

Operating on Headlines

Use the Operations menu to alter attributes about it such as TODO state, scheduling, tags, and priority. To use it, move the point to the line of a heading you wish to change and from the main menu select “(o) Operations”. The following menu will be displayed.

Marking Headlines

User the Mark menu to mark different headlines and perform a bulk action on them. From the main menu, select “(m) Mark” to display the following menu:

Changing Modes and Settings

Agenda views have different display modes and behavior that can be modified from the Settings menu. From the main menu, select “(,) Settings” to display the following menu:

Almanac

Get sunrise/sunset times, lunar cycle dates, and holidays with respect to a date via the Almanac menu. From the main menu, select “(l) Almanac” to display the following menu.

Unicode Symbol Support

By enabling “(u) Use Unicode Symbols” from the Settings menu, Casual Agenda will use Unicode symbols as appropriate in its menus.

Installation Notes

Casual Agenda requires that you have a relatively recent version of Org (≥ 9.7.1) and Transient, both built-in packages to Emacs 29.1+. To update those packages you will need to take into consideration Emacs' default policy of not upgrading built-in packages unless configuring it to explicitly do so. My last blog post provides more detail on this.

Closing Thoughts

As with the other Casual Suite packages, Casual Agenda is intended to lower the cognitive load of using Agenda views. Even as I’ve already committed to memory many of these commands, it’s often that I mess up by issuing the wrong binding at the wrong place or just plain failing to recall a command. Since building and using Casual Agenda, this has happened less so. You might perhaps share the same experience.

emacs   org mode