Re: [O] Is there a way to get all agenda TODOs programmatically?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2018-01-01, at 00:37, Adam Porter <address@hidden> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Thanks again.  I played around with this for some time, but there is one
>> problem.  The agenda has a lot of settings, and replicating them with
>> org-map-entries turned out to be no fun.
>>
>> Is there a way to plug into the agenda generating functions somehow to
>> get a Lisp list of agenda items?  I'm pretty sure that can be done -
>> org-super-agenda does something similar, after all - but I have no idea
>> why.  I could delve into agenda source myself, but is is quite hairy, so
>> maybe someone knows that already?
>
> Hi Marcin,
>
> As you said, the agenda code is quite hairy--but it does work very well.
> My meager attempt to begin reimplementing it in a more functional way
> showed very poor performance by comparison; perhaps because I didn't do
> it well, but I'm guessing also because of Emacs' function call overhead.
> But for your project, perhaps the code would come in useful; feel free
> to borrow anything that you like:
>
> https://github.com/alphapapa/org-agenda-ng
>
> As you mentioned, org-super-agenda simply uses the raw output of the
> org-agenda commands by reading it from the agenda buffer.  This works
> well because each line in the agenda buffer is an item, and the text on
> each line has Emacs text-properties that include most of the relevant
> metadata (anything else can be retrieved by using a macro to eval code
> at the item's marker--see org-super-agenda--when-with-marker-buffer,
> which I should probably rename, haha).  So getting a list of agenda
> items could be as simple as running this in the agenda buffer:
>
> (split-string (buffer-substring (point-min) (point-max))
>               "\n" 'omit-nulls)
>
> org-super-agenda does that by using advice to filter the return of
> org-agenda-finalize-entries, which you could also do quite easily.
>
> So while the agenda code is relatively opaque, it's easier to use its
> output than you might think.  :) Let me know if I can help.  (I haven't
> been monitoring the list lately, so you might email me directly if
> necessary.)  Good luck!

Hi Adam,

and thanks for your answer.  I never thought about analyzing agenda
/output/ - that is quite clever!  I still think it's a hack, and
I really regret that Org does not offer a programmer a better API for
agenda (and many other things) - there could be a lot of applications
built on top of Org with that.  I'll definitely try this solution some
day (maybe even within a few days).

Thanks and best,

--
Marcin Borkowski