Re: Sort TODOs in agenda day

[Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz@cern.ch>]

At Wed, 1 Feb 2012 07:51:59 -0500,
Bernt Hansen wrote:

> You can add BOTH time-up and effort-up to the sorting strategy for the
> agenda and time will prevail - for items with a time, and effort will be
> the next sorting criteria.

The point I missed is that time-up will only be applied to those items
have a date-stamp for the day in question, so that effort-up will not
be outranked by time-up for the rest of the entries.

> Have you tried this?
> 
> ;; Sorting order for tasks on the agenda
> (setq org-agenda-sorting-strategy
>       (quote ((agenda time-up effort-up))))

I have now: initially I thought that the time-up would leave nothing
for effort-up to work on.

> When I was first experimented with the sorting strategy I used the
> customize interface to set it for the current session only and looked at
> the result of my agenda with the new setting.

Yes, setting configurations for current session only is a huge boon
for trials, but the clunky customize interface for manipulating the
values is a bit annoying compared to Emacs' built in sexpr
manipulation. Swapping the order of two sorting strategy entries, for
example, is very painful compared to C-M-t. Is there some convenient
way of, say, swapping entries in the customize interface?

> (setq org-agenda-sorting-strategy
>       (quote ((agenda habit-down time-up user-defined-up priority-down effort-up category-keep)
> 	      (todo category-up priority-down effort-up)
> 	      (tags category-up priority-down effort-up)
> 	      (search category-up))))
> 
> so for the agenda daily view habits are at the bottom, and timed items
> are at the top, then my user-defined sorting function sorts what is left
> for the middle section of the list in the following order:

It's still not entirely clear to me how these options work. Take
habit-down, at the beginning. What do the '-down' and '-up' mean? I
infer that they might have one of two meanings: in 'habit-down' the
'-down' seems to mean that habits should be placed at the bottom,
while in 'effort-down' I infer that it means that items with an effort
property should be sorted by decreasing effort, relative to eachother.

There's clearly some confusion in my mind about how these work.

>   - items with no schedule/deadline and timestamped for today
>   - deadlines for today
>   - late deadlines
>   - scheduled items for today
>   - late scheduled items
>   - and pending deadlines last

Incidentally, why did you need to create a macro which captures num-a,
num-b result, for your implementation of bh/agenda-sort?  AFAICT,
functions which return +1,-1 or nil would have been adeqate here. What
have I missed?