11.2 The Agenda Dispatcher

The views are created through a dispatcher, accessible with M-x org-agenda, or, better, bound to a global key (see Activation). It displays a menu from which an additional letter is required to execute a command. The dispatcher offers the following default commands:

a

Create the calendar-like agenda (see Weekly/daily agenda).

t

T

Create a list of all TODO items (see Global TODO list).

m

M

Create a list of headlines matching a given expression (see Matching tags and properties).

s

Create a list of entries selected by a boolean expression of keywords and/or regular expressions that must or must not occur in the entry.

/

Search for a regular expression in all agenda files and additionally in the files listed in org-agenda-text-search-extra-files. This uses the Emacs command multi-occur. A prefix argument can be used to specify the number of context lines for each match, default is

#

Create a list of stuck projects (see Stuck projects).

!

Configure the list of stuck projects (see Stuck projects).

<

Restrict an agenda command to the current buffer¹. If narrowing is in effect restrict to the narrowed part of the buffer. After pressing <, you still need to press the character selecting the command.

< <

If there is an active region, restrict the following agenda command to the region. Otherwise, restrict it to the current subtree². After pressing < <, you still need to press the character selecting the command.

*

Toggle sticky agenda views. By default, Org maintains only a single agenda buffer and rebuilds it each time you change the view, to make sure everything is always up to date. If you switch between views often and the build time bothers you, you can turn on sticky agenda buffers (make this the default by customizing the variable org-agenda-sticky). With sticky agendas, the dispatcher only switches to the selected view, you need to update it by hand with r or g. You can toggle sticky agenda view any time with org-toggle-sticky-agenda.

You can also define custom commands that are accessible through the dispatcher, just like the default commands. This includes the possibility to create extended agenda buffers that contain several blocks together, for example the weekly agenda, the global TODO list and a number of special tags matches. See Custom Agenda Views.

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1. For backward compatibility, you can also press 1 to restrict to the current buffer.↩
2. For backward compatibility, you can also press 0 to restrict to the current region/subtree.↩