[emacs-wiki-discuss] Making planner simpler

[Sacha Chua]

Hiya, everyone!

Many non-Emacs users believe that Emacs is confusing and scary, but
powerful. The same is starting to be said of Planner. I'm resisting
the urge to take it as a compliment. ;)

This impression is not helped by the fact that my website has a
gazillion tasks and hyperlinks. People get the idea that I'm some kind
of organization freak. I should post a picture of my very cluttered
desk to dispel that notion. If anything, I procrastinate more than
other people do because planner.el lets me. ;)

I'd like to make it easy to get started with planner. When people are
used to (plan) as the last thing in their ~/.emacs, _then_ we show
them all the other funky stuff, which is all optional anyway. Must
make it clear that people happily use Planner without Gnus,
without publishing, without plan pages, without hyperlinks, without
remember, without detailed plans, etc...

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerModeMethods tries to be a
step in the (right?) direction. What else can we do to make it easier?

I'm thinking of turning off plan pages by default so that newbies
don't have to worry about things like "TaskPool". It'll be like the
way we have an option to turn off day pages. This will probably be
controlled by a variable called planner-use-plan-pages . However, I
can't set it for newbies without surprising the heck out of everyone
else, so... umm... have any ideas on how to go about doing this?

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, CS ed
applying as a Debian new maintainer | looking for a grad school