org mode - prevent future repetitive entries from showing up in agenda view

Question

It seems to be obvious but I don't seem to have been able to find an answer yet... I have some repetitive tasks which have a property in the style of SCHEDULED: <2015-05-22 Fri 23:00 .+4d>. However this has the effect of making that task also showing up on the agenda view of May 26, May 30... etc. etc., which clutters up the agenda view significantly. I notice that scheduled entries with habit style don't behave like this, however I don't want to make all repetitive tasks into habit. There must be a way to prevent future occurrences of repetitive tasks(Both DEADLINE and SCHEDULED) from showing up on calendar prematurely?

Answer 1

The default value for the variable org-agenda-repeating-timestamp-show-all is t -- i.e., "Non-nil means show all occurrences of a repeating stamp in the agenda." The variable can be set to "a list of strings" to "only show occurrences of repeating stamps for these TODO keywords." When the variable is set to nil, "only one occurrence is shown, either today or the nearest into the future." Therefore, the original poster may wish to add the following line to the .emacs or init.el file:

(setq org-agenda-repeating-timestamp-show-all nil)

Answer 2

TL;DR: (setq org-agenda-show-future-repeats nil).

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You have to set org-agenda-show-future-repeats to nil. The previous option org-agenda-repeating-timestamp-show-all has been removed from Org mode in version 9.1, as the new pair of options—the previously named org-agenda-show-future-repeats and org-agenda-prefer-last-repeat—provide a more fine grained control over the shown tasks in the agenda.

Note that org-agenda-show-future-repeats also supports next if you want to show a single future repeat. For more information, see M-x customize-option org-agenda-show-future-repeats.