Ashish Panigrahi has an interesting post on customizing his agenda view. He’s a graduate student, apparently in the sciences, and has to keep track of his tasks and their statuses. The natural solution for us Emacsers is to use Org mode and the agenda view to track these things.
There’s nothing exciting about that, of course, but what makes his post interesting is that he shows how to create a custom agenda view. It’s easy to make a custom view and I have a lot of them but they’re pretty simple. Panigrahi views are more complex and he demonstrates how to specify more intricate criteria for the view.
For his main view, he wants to show tasks that he’s completed since his last group meeting. That means he wants to filter for tasks completed in the last 7 days that aren’t personal items. He also wants to keep tags, so he makes sure they aren’t removed.
Finally, since he often consults this view, he has a function that calls it with a simple Ctrl+c w rather than having to go through the agenda dispatch menu.
As I said, you probably won’t care about his particular view but it’s instructive to see how he defined it as a jumping off place for your own views.