[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Making planner simpler

[Sacha Chua]

Carl Worth <address@hidden> writes:

> note that there may be ways to do some of the things I wanted, but
> if so I didn't find them, so that may point to holes in the
> documentation.

I don't think the official documentation can keep up with all the
little tricks people have come up with, so describing one's goal on
the mailing list still seems to be the best way to go for now.

> never know in advance a date for the task---I intend the planning
> process to help me figure out the scheduling. And as for "page", isn't

Ooh, you're lucky. Again, this is something you wouldn't have learned
from the manual (okay, it's documented there, but it's buried kinda
deep), but if you don't really use day pages a lot when creating tasks, you
can:

(defadvice planner-create-task-from-buffer (around cworth activate)
 "Don't use day pages."
 (let ((planner-use-day-pages nil))
  ad-do-it))

I knew planner-use-day-pages might be handy someday! <impish grin>
(Don't worry, you wouldn't be the first person...)

You can leave it on during the rest of the times.

> I entered a new task by manually typing something like:
>       #A0  _ Test manual tasks (2004.12.14)

Stuff like

#A0 _ Test manual tasks

is fine, but Emacs doesn't have a way of automatically knowing that
whatever you should type in should be cross-linked. I was playing
around with the idea of post-command-hook, but it's still far, far too
complex for me.

What I usually do is type

#A0 _ Test manual tasks

then hit C-c C-c (planner-copy-or-move-task). It's actually also
easier to type the date in that way.

If I feel really diligent, I'll actually type the date in as well, then
call M-x planner-update-task .

> these) doesn't help me. I don't think I want the computer to sort a list
> for me after I assign prioritization codes. That feels like an
> unnecessarily indirect means of sorting. I think I'd rather just see a

Actually, the numbers just depend on the position in the list, and in
fact are completely optional (unless I broke something). In the
future, we might have a flag to make newly-created tasks not have
numbers.

> That sounds to me like something very close to "raw" emacs-wiki
> along with good backlinks support. Perhaps planner could provide
> this simpler interface, or maybe I should just try to get emacs-wiki
> alone to give me what I need.

Come to think of it, emacs-wiki and really fast rewriting might be
able to do this, although syncing would still be a problem... <muses>

> In the meantime, right now I'm just maintaining a ~/TODO file with a
> list of tasks. Then each day as I complete things I move them down
> in the file to dated sections. That's doing a fair job of letting me
> track things, but I would love more help from the computer in
> narrowing my view to related tasks and in publishing the results.

Little hacks forward. <grin> For example, you've probably already
written something that marks the current task as done and moves it to
the correct section, creating the section if necessary. Sounds like a
pretty fun hack.

After that, you could steal the ideas behind
planner-create-task-from-buffer and the emacs-wiki hyperlinking
mechanism so that you can enjoy hyperlinking too. =)

> Thanks for taking the time to listen. Hopefully something I've said
> has been useful.

Very much so! We get lots of ideas from non-planner people too. Thanks
for your input!

-- 
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
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