 When you try to explain to people that don't use Emacs about org mode They are confused. They don't understand. What is the point? And I was like that I switched from them over to Emacs and even after using Emacs for a few months still I didn't quite understand just how amazing org mode was it is a complete game changer because Many people have this misconception. I know I did. I just thought org mode was another kind of markdown Markup language or markdown language is similar to how people say things like markdown itself is kind of a game changer Because you can write everything and markdown kind of a shorthand right or people talk about how la tech is great and gruff is great And I just thought org mode was very similar to things like that But org mode is so much more than just a form of markdown and when you add some of the extra org mode Extensions like org agenda, which is the topic of today's video It just really turns Emacs into this amazing Productivity tool because you can use it for to-do lists and scheduling Project management you can plan out every single thing you want to do for the day the week the month the year and I've never been one of those people that actually do that that schedule everything out and to use to-do lists and things like that I've never found them useful for my workflow, but the more that I play with org mode and org agenda I could see myself actually using these things. So let me show you some of this in action Let me go ahead and launch my emacs here This is doom emacs and in doom emacs if you hit space fr for searching for recent files I'm gonna search for a file that I titled agenda org And let me hit enter and I'm gonna zoom in here now right now This is just an empty document, but I'm gonna show you a little bit of some org mode basics And then how org agenda plays into all this as well So I've done some videos in the past talking about some of the basics of org mode But just a refresher here if I get into insert mode here and I do a single asterisk This is a top-level heading and I'm gonna call this task list I'm gonna hit enter and then I'm gonna do a second level heading by doing two asteris and Then I'm gonna hit enter and then I'm gonna write the word to do and when I do it changes color And then the to-do item I'm making a note of is I need to make a video about org agenda Now let's talk about org agenda if you do meta x and type the word org agenda That would launch org agenda, but you see in doom emacs. There is a key binding for space. Oh Capital a so I'm gonna use that key binding because if you're gonna learn to use org agenda You're gonna launch it all the time. You might as well learn the key binding for it So space. Oh capital a and then you get this new menu that comes up a Gives you the agenda for the current week or the current day T gives you a list of all the to-do entries that you have and then it has some other options as well They're less useful options or options that you're not gonna use very often typically you're either gonna do a for the agenda or The t for the to-do so I'm gonna do t for to-do right now And this gives me a list of all my to-do items that org mode knows about Which is just one item right now because I this is new to me I typically don't make to-do lists But right now it's letting me know I have a to-do item and it is make a video about org agenda Doesn't have a scheduling date or anything. I didn't give it a time or date or anything It's just marked as a to-do item now if I hit Q I'll quit out of org agenda And I'll get back into my agenda org document here that I created now other than the asterix You know to create these headings these top level headings second level headings third level fourth level fifth level Etc. You could also make a list. Oh, I accidentally hit space. Let me hit space one more time But that's interesting though when you hit space on a to-do item I'll mention this it does mark it as done So and if I mark it as done if I do space o capital a again and to get back into the agenda menu And then go to t for the to-do list you say I don't have a to-do item listed anymore because once their mark Is done. They're no longer in this to-do view Q to quit I'm gonna mark that as a to-do item though what I want to do is I actually want to get into insert mode And hit enter I wanted to show you guys how to create a list here So I'm gonna make a list to create a list you typically do either the plus sign or the minus sign as far as your list Bullet points and I'm going to say you can use space dash m dash t dash t to mark as To-do so what this is is other than doing the space on an item to toggle to do and done You could also do space MTT to just mark something as to do if it wasn't already marked So let me actually I'm gonna go and I'll just delete this here And I've removed the to-do item now if I want to make it a to-do item specifically a to-do item space MTT and that marks it as to do I'm gonna go back down here And now that I'm on this line that is a plus symbol list kind of item if I hit control enter I Get another plus sign and then I could enter another list item And what I'm gonna do on this line is I'm just gonna tell you guys that space M Ds opens the org schedule And escape to get into normal mode So what I can do is I can go to this item this to-do item and space MDS Opens the org schedule meaning I can add a date I can schedule a time and date for this to-do item event So let me do that space MDS and now when I open the org schedule You see I get this calendar down here and you can actually just click on a date with the mouse If you want to adjust the date with the keyboard what you can do is you can do shift arrow to adjust the date You see the date is moving in the calendar The date is also moving as far as the time and date at the bottom of the screen But anyway, so today is Friday the 25th So I will do today's date and then for a time you can do 24-hour time As a matter of fact, it's typically going to be 24-hour time that shows up in your org agenda But if you want to use AM and PM you can actually do something like 9 PM and when I hit enter though, it's going to convert it to 24-hour time You see my to-do item make a video about org agenda is scheduled for tonight at 2100 hours 9 p.m And let me paste some of what I've already discussed here I'll add that to the list and I may share this org mode document with you guys But again, this is just some of the basics of org mode We really are not getting that deep on this but now that I've added a scheduled event So now if I do space O capital A and then do T for to-do Of course, I have the one to-do item in this list Let me Q to quit but if I do space O capital A and do a for the agenda view I have something in the agenda view now I would not have had this had I not actually had something scheduled But I have something scheduled now at 9 o'clock tonight And it's letting me know that the current time by the way is 1411 So that's pretty cool And then of course it has two hour blocks also and it just does this for today's date If I had nothing scheduled for today, this would be empty It doesn't do this for the other 10 days that it shows here in my org agenda It just does today's date. It's letting you know what you have on your plate for today Now let me Q to quit. I'm gonna go back to this time here So let me go down to the schedule time. You see it's Friday You remember shift and the arrow keys adjusted the date in the org schedule Well, you can do that directly in the document as well If I do shift and then the right arrow key watch the date changes from Friday to Saturday And now let me do a space O capital a a for agenda And now you see Friday today. We don't have anything. It's just empty But you see tomorrow Saturday We have something scheduled now at 2100 hours on Saturday night and make a video about org agenda Now remember the space MTT to toggle something or to turn something into a to-do item Well, if I go down to this to-do item and I do space MT You see I get this list of all the states that I can make an item Including if I hit T one more time make it a to-do item if I hit P It'll turn it into a project as for start W for weight H for hold D for done K for kill And in some other items as well These are the defaults in do me max now I can actually change these if I want different states different ways to mark items I can do that and I will show you how to do that later But say I wanted to change this from a to-do item to a project I just hit P on the keyboard So space MT to get to that menu and then P to turn it into a project if I want to go back to a to-do item I would do space MT to get to this list and then T to turn it back to a to-do item Now if you mark something as done or canceled or Anything like that it will no longer be in your to-do list view as well So anytime you do space O capital A T for the to-do list once something is marked as done It drops out of the list So let me quit back out of that and I'm gonna go down here And I'm gonna hit O on the keyboard start a new line and get me into insert mode And I'm gonna do two asterisks here, and I'm gonna write another to-do item And that did not convert because I got these spaces here. Okay, let me get rid of those Unneeded spaces now this next to-do item. I don't know. Maybe I want to review lists and checkboxes and order mode because Obviously we should discuss that already showed you kind of how to create a list But I didn't show you guys this and I've done this on past videos though if you do a List heading and then do empty brackets with a space that is considered a empty checkbox And if you did control return That adds a new list item at the same level which we already discussed So let me hit control return and then I could type a new list here Maybe this works for bullets to Because you know these are technically bullet lists here where the asterisks were something else more like headline levels But either way control return always at gets you another line at the same level and the same type Now if you want to tick a checkbox the default emacs keybinding for this is control C control C So control C control C. Yes, he turns that into an X, right? It's no longer unchecked We've actually checked that checkbox control C control C again will uncheck it now. That's a standard emacs canoe emacs keybinding and Doom emacs. There is a different key binding. You could also use space Mx So I'm gonna use the doom emacs keybinding space Mx space Mx Does the exact same thing actually the good new emacs keybinding control C control C is probably a little easier to use actually than the Doom specific key binding of space Mx, but either one work now one interesting thing when you have a list of checkbox items which you could do in the top heading which in my case would be review list and checkboxes in org mode if I go up here and get into insert mode and I do a Empty bracket here, but inside the bracket instead of making it empty. I'm going to do a Slash now let me hit escape and I'm going to go down here And I'm going to do space Mx to tick that on you see we checked that but look what happened in that bracket One of three because we have completed one of three tasks technically if I go down to the next line And I do space Mx now we've completed two of three and of course if I go down to the last one space Mx We have completed three of three now. Let me undo these And you will see they will go back to being zero of three now one thing about list items You can have lists within list so if I go here if I do a paste here I'm just going to paste this Nested list within a list so this list item this works for bullets to has sub list items So list item one two and three and what I could do here is watch what happens when I check these So if I do space Mx you see that now instead of an empty box It has a minus symbol that's letting you know that some of what you needed to do for this list item has been completed Not everything, but if I eventually complete everything watch what happens space Mx to check that space Mx to check that And once I check these three sub items then that top item is Checked because we've completed everything that was involved right as long as you complete the three sub list items then that top item is completed as well and I'm going to go ahead and paste some more stuff in here and Talk about org agenda now. We've already talked about how to launch it space. Oh, capital A That's a do me max scheme binding So space O capital a gets you this list and we've already talked about after space O capital a if you hit a You get to the agenda view you hit T You get to the to-do list view all your to-do items But we haven't talked about one other one that you will often use will be s for search for keywords So let me hit s in this case. It's gonna ask for searching for keywords Maybe the keyword I want to search for is Org I know there's several lines in this document that have the word or if I hit enter It will actually show me the to-do items that have the word org as part of the search string So this list here to do make a video about org agenda to do review listen checkbox is in org mode And then of course this project that I just pasted the project is called org agenda launch with space. Oh a alright I mean cue to quit out of that. So the search works You can also use regular expressions in the search. So if I do space O capital a s for another search I could do something like a asterisk symbol meaning. Hey, it's a wild card character And then maybe give it a couple of characters like ke And you see it returned a couple of different lines from the document from that This to do make a video about org agenda because asterisk a e does match the word make it also Matches the word key word as well Cue to quit out of that by the way I since I pasted this you guys didn't actually see me write it But these weird bullet points here are just more asterisk. So this is a second level asterisk This is a third level and this is a fourth level because I use funny symbols In mind, but if you guys actually wanted to see me write these, you know, that's a third asterisk And this is a fourth asterisk. So if I actually just keep deleting one two three four asterisk Now let's get back to scheduling some items So I'm gonna scroll back up and and I had already scheduled that first to do item But I didn't add a schedule to the second to do item So let's go ahead and schedule it you guys remember the do me max key binding space MDS for the org schedule And we can pick a date the date I will leave as today's date and I will say we need to do this at 11 p.m. And I hit enter and you guys see that now this to-do item now has up under it scheduled at the time And date tonight at 11 p.m. If I do a space o capital a and then a for the agenda view You see I have both those to-do items kind of cool But one interesting thing you can do and let me zoom into the to-do item if I can I'm not sure Can I zoom in in this view? I've never actually tried it It doesn't appear that I can zoom in in a word agenda at least the default key binding that I use which is control And the plus symbol doesn't work here because I guess the control key is used for other things in the agenda view But that's fine I don't need to be zoomed in you guys can surely can tell it's just a list of dates with every item That has a schedule listed but one neat thing you can do Let me cue to quit out of that is if I go back into the scheduled event here So the second item I'm going to get into insert mode I'm going to do a space and I'm going to do plus plus 1d for one day So I want to schedule this event Friday at 11 p.m. Tonight at 11 p.m. Plus plus one day meaning do this Every day every single day basically so every Plus one day we're going to do the same event So let me get back into the agenda view. So if I do space o capital a a and now you see all of a sudden I have all these other to-do items because Reviewing lists and checkboxes in org mode now. I have to do that tonight at 11 p.m. Tomorrow night at 11 p.m. Sunday night at 11 p.m. Etc Every day till the end of time basically is what I just did there So if you have events that are basically on your schedule every single day That is how you do that you just get in there and you know behind the time and date just do a space plus plus 1d So I could really see using org mode and org scheduling in my life the org agenda Feature is just fantastic. So I have this this list here, which was task list We'll say that was my work task list But let me do another top-level heading because maybe I want to do a personal task list as well and maybe I want to do a Subheading for this maybe stuff around the house. So home task You know what I'll go ahead since we talked about it and do this empty Bracket with the slash here and let's go ahead and start adding some list items. What do I need to do? Well, I need to Move the yard Then control enter to get the next item put trash Out for pickup. I might need to schedule that you know, that's a one day a week kind of thing Then you know, maybe I need to wash my car. It's getting kind of dirty as well Now, let me go ahead and add another second level heading here Let me get rid of the empty spaces there And this one is going to be my shopping list for the week So I don't want to create a lengthy shopping list here But I think what I probably want to do is just put the bear essentials here things I absolutely need I do have a cat so I need to pick up some cat food And then if I hit control return the next most important item I should pick up while I'm shopping is Beer and then the next most important thing, you know what I could really use some bacon because it's Practically its own food group. It goes with everything and we'll add one more. How about more beer? All right, and that shopping list is really important. That's something I definitely need to do I'm not exactly sure when I need to do it But let's at least add it to our to-do list and you know what let's go ahead and schedule it to we know It's important. So let's go ahead and make sure we have it down for a date So remember or schedule space MDS and I'm going to schedule it for I'm going to do shift arrow And I'm going to schedule it for Wednesday September the 30th, and we'll do it I don't know how about 10 a.m. I just do 10 colon 0 0 24 hour time, of course, that's already 10 a.m. So I don't need to add the AM for it And now space O capital a a again for the agenda now has my to-do item for Wednesday the 30th Now I'm scheduled at 10 o'clock in the morning to take care of that shopping list if I do space O capital a T the shopping list is also in the to-do list because I marked it as a to-do item If it wasn't marked as a to-do item it would not be in this list So remember you have two different lists there You have the agenda view and then you have your to-do view and under my personal task list I think the next thing I need to do is very important. Let's go ahead and make a gym schedule So let's go ahead and we'll do these as Items as well. I think the first most important day should be leg day Of course control return and then we need to do how about chest shoulders and biceps Yeah, why not and then what does that leave? Well, we need to do abs back and Triceps. Yeah, that covers pretty much the whole body. We'll just leave it at that. Let's go ahead and schedule that So I'm gonna go up here I'm not gonna mark it as a to-do item. Well, you know what? I'll mark it as a to-do item Why not it doesn't matter. This is just for fun, but we need to schedule it When am I going to go to the gym? Well, the gym is a recurring thing But maybe I wanted to go every day for four or five days straight So what I could do here is let me do space MDS to get the org schedule and I'm gonna schedule it for tomorrow, which is Saturday And I'll schedule myself to go to the gym at 9 a.m. And now what I could do Well, let's first take a look at it in the org agenda. So space O capital a lowercase a you see if I go down My gym schedule is at 9 a.m. Tomorrow Q to quit But since I want to go several days in a row also at 9 a.m. What I could do is I could go down here and May get into insert mode and behind that time snap I'm gonna do a dash dash and then the brackets opening brackets I'm gonna schedule it for 20 20 dash 09 dash 30th, you know every day for the rest of the month here basically so four days straight the 30th I believe is a Tuesday. So I got to make sure I get that right and then the closing bracket So let me hit escape and now when I go space O capital a lowercase a to get back into the agenda view I should have the gym on the list every day and I do you see now I have actually I have two gym items on the list here because it see one of five Two of five three of five four or five and then the last day is five of five So I scheduled it five days straight there now one thing I noticed is I actually did not give it a time It it doesn't look like did I not add 9 a.m. To that me Q to quit out of that It is 9 a.m. Here the first date, but I didn't add a time on the Last one. Let me escape out of that and then do space O a a and now it should actually have the right times Yes before it just had it on the list, but they weren't set to a time Actually, they're still not set to the time. The first one is set to 9 a.m. The last one is set to 9 a.m But everything in between is still just a to-do item, but it doesn't have a specific time So I'm not exactly sure how I would go about that But I'm sure I could figure it out if I actually reviewed the documentation on that But it is pretty neat that you can actually schedule things for multiple days in a row So let's get into some of the configuration stuff that you need to worry about when you do things with org mode and org agenda So I'm gonna open up a second window here and do me max and I'm gonna open up my do me max config and My config file for do me max by the way is an org document You can actually write your config as an org document. Let me zoom in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing I'm gonna go back to this window and zoom out. I'm zoomed way in on that one All right, so in my config file I have a section called org mode and in do me max I have this section here that starts with after exclamation point space org what this does is an elisp This says hey after this module loads Then do everything else and this is very important because in do me max org mode has some default settings and if you don't add this line here the after org What you're gonna find is that whatever settings you have are probably gonna be loaded almost immediately Instantaneously when do me max loads, but then doom will eventually launch its own defaults and overwrite yours So you have to specify do not set my settings until after do me max does what it wants with the its own default setting So that's why you need that line. It's very important and then after it loads the default org module I want it to set org directory. So you see set q space org dash directory This is where all my org document should live on my computer and I put them in documents slash org I also specify that org dash agenda dash files This is where all my agenda files should be and what is the agenda files? Well when you do space O capital a and then you know some other Letter such as a for the agenda. Where is it getting this stuff? Well, it's in my case I'm telling it get that stuff from document slash org slash Agenda dot org and it doesn't just have to have to be one file you could specify two three However, many files you want you could even specify a directory Maybe a directory and then a wild card character such as asterix dot org So pull my agendas from this directory and everything that ends in dot org for example a lot of people Do just one file might be one big file if you schedule a lot of things just having one file for your agenda Could become kind of a hassle kind of tedious because it would be a giant fall and you'd have a ton of stuff on your schedule So you may want to break it up into multiple files if you have a lot of stuff that you're working with Now I had mentioned that you can mark items as to do project done and various other things So remember space MT get you this menu and this is where you can mark things as T for to do P for project as for start W for weight H for hold. These are the default States for to do items in doom emacs, but you don't have to use these you can customize these to be Whatever you want and as an example here I had this line that I've commented out But I will just show you that I can overwrite the defaults in doom emacs So let me do a colon W for write and this is set Q space org dash to do dash keywords So set the org to do keywords to be to do T Project P because I like those I think those make sense, but I make videos I want to to do item to be a video. So I did video V I also kept weight for W and then I have this one here Which is a slash our pipe symbol basically the pipe symbol separates the to do keywords Everything before the pipe symbol are active Everything behind the pipe symbol are inactive states. So a to do item or project a video. Those are active to do states Done and cancelled are obviously inactive to do states meaning I don't want you to appear in the to do list That's basically what those mean. It means done items cancelled items don't appear in the to do list to do project video And weight will appear in my to do list So let me Rebuild my doom emacs with these settings. So I'm going to gg to get to the top of this document And then I'm going to do control c control c to refresh my org config my config.org here And then I need to tangle it because I have to run org babble tangle to convert my config.org into a config.el Because it really needs to be a elisp document Now you guys don't have to worry about that unless you are also Using a org file as your config most of you are probably just going to have a config.el that you work with So you don't have to do any of what I just did to reload things And then you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and close out emacs And I'm going to run a kill all emacs as well just to make sure That my emacs will be using the new config And let me launch it and let me get back into my agenda.org And let me zoom in a little bit and let's go to this first item At least the first to-do item that is if I do space mt You now see I have different options for my to-do states to-do project video weight done and cancelled So if I wanted to change this from a to-do item instead of t I could do v and now I've made this to-do item make a video about org agenda and you know the to-do state is video So let me do space o capital a t for my to-do list and you see it's video make a video about org agenda Make you to get out of that. Let me do a space fr to search for recent files One other thing I wanted to do in my config.org or at least show you guys how to do this is Let me get back down to the org mode section By default when you schedule something in org mode it of course gives a time stamp But when you mark something as done So you have a to-do item and eventually you complete it So you find that to-do item you hit return and you mark it as done But wouldn't it be cool if it added a time stamp when you actually completed the task? That seems like something that it probably should do out of the box, but it doesn't but you can make it do that So I have this line here set queue space org-log-done space The single quote time and what that does is when you mark something as done in org It's gonna add a time stamp to it. That's all that means. So let me write and let me get back up here I'm gonna refresh this. I'm gonna run the org babble tangle again Let me relaunch emacs And now let me get back into my agenda dot org Zoom in again and now this to-do item that I have make a video about org agenda. Watch what happens when I toggle this as done So I just highlight it and hit enter and it marks it as done I still have the scheduled time stamp But right before it closed and then I have the time stamp of when I hit done on it So that is probably a very important line I think everybody probably wants to add to their config if you're going to use org agenda It makes sense when you have a project and you mark it done you want that time stamp Now one other thing you could do let me get back into the config.org Is if you did not want to just do a time stamp Maybe you wanted to leave a note as well instead of doing the org log done as time You could do set queue space org-log-done Then single quote note and what this does is when you mark a to-do item as done You get to leave a note It also adds a time stamp, but it also adds a extra note that you have to write So let me write this and let me reload my config So let me relaunch do me max here space far to get to my recent files Let me get back into the agenda org And now this to-do item is still here and now let me mark it as done And instead of giving a closed time stamp it'll give a closed time stamp But it will also ask me to write a note. So I'm gonna Go down to this to-do item hit enter And it marked it as done it gave a closing time stamp and then it has a Split over here. It's asking me write a note. I'm gonna write I finished this Early Cuz I'm awesome It escape and control c control c to kill that split and you see now I It's marked done has a closing time stamp the original scheduling time stamp And then it has a closing note as well and the closing note And it also has a time stamp when I like it's left of the note says I finish this early because I'm awesome So that is a very brief look at org mode org scheduling and org agenda. It's just fantastic I don't I may actually start using this like on a regular basis I may actually just start planning out all of my days You know when I just did this on the fly here making out Things like home tasks shopping lists and especially a gym schedule. Yeah, I may actually start doing that Why not? Why not be able to just pull up my agenda for the day and actually figure out what I actually have planned A schedule times for it and and be ready to go with this stuff Maybe it will make me more productive. Again. I've never been a productivity tool user But I do enjoy playing With org mode like it's it's fun to use org mode It really is even if I'm just goofing off like making that agenda.org document here on camera for you guys It's just fun playing with this stuff. And so I you know, it wouldn't be tedious. I think sometimes I was just sitting down making a list as a tedious task But the playing with emacs I actually enjoy Now before I go I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Arch5530, a commie channel, Chuck, Claudio, Donny, Dillon, George, Kelop, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott, and Willie These guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys This episode about org mode and org agenda wouldn't have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen These are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community You'd like to support my work look for distro tube over on patreon. All right guys Peace