Sort org-agenda items by category

Question

When using the agenda in org-mode to show my daily tasks, there's a bunch of tasks scheduled for that day (or with past deadlines) that appear at the bottom.

I'd like these tasks, and only these, to be sorted by category.

Is that possible?

Answer 1

You can customize (or setq) the variable org-agenda-sorting-strategy to change the sort order. For example, the default is:

((agenda habit-down time-up priority-down category-keep)
  (todo priority-down category-keep)
  (tags priority-down category-keep)
  (search category-keep))

If you changed the first line to:

((agenda category-up habit-down time-up priority-down)

(for example), it would sort the agenda first by category from A-Z, then by habits, then by time, then by priority.

So you can tweak the order to get the behavior you want. The various options for how to sort are described in the documentation for the org-agenda-sorting-strategy variable.