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

[Carl Worth]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:35:20 -0800, Jody Klymak wrote:
> You know that just hitting return at each prompt gives you the
> default?

Yes.

> The default day and "PlanPage" should be today and TaskPool,
> unless you are on a PlanPage, in which case it is the current
> PlanPage.  This default behavior is pretty useful, in my opinion.  I'm
> sure it could easily be hacked to not do this, but hitting return a
> couple of times isn't onerous.

The default date of today is the one that doesn't fit my planning
style. The first things I did when I sat down with planner was try write
a big list of things that I want to do, (enough to take me several weeks
or month). Having these all assigned to the same date (today!) leads to
a rather overwhelming list of things to accomplish in one day. ;-)

Changing the default date to nil would help a lot. To compensate, a
single character mnemonic for today could also be provided, (something
like '.'?).

> The -from-buffer command adds an annotation to the note.  i.e.:
> 
> #A0  _ Test: [[/Users/jklymak/flip/CtdProcessingNew/GridAll.m]] {{Tasks:259}}
>  (TaskPool)

Ah! And see, I had started out playing with planner by opening a blank
plan page, so I completely missed this functionally.

> How would the buffer (2004.12.14) know what you had typed on your new
> page?

There are any number of mechanisms that could be used for
this. Switching to view a page like this could trigger a scan for
backlinks and insert the new tasks. Or, a more minor change would be to
recognize when a new task was typed and implicitly call
planner-create-task with all the right arguments.

> If you think about it, this would be somewhat nasty behaviour
> in general; I often put links in my tasks that do *not* mean I want
> the task to show up in the linked page.  

That's why I would only want the magic implicit task creation when a
line was entered that matches the existing task structure. There seems
to be enough structure already to avoid any unpleasant ambiguity.

> I'm kind of with you there.  Except the sorting *is* best done by
> hand - i.e. kill and yank a task into the order you want.  The
> numbering resorts itself.  

Oh, OK. That's good to know as it is exactly the way I want to sort. The
number display wouldn't be strictly necessary in that case, but I would
be fine if it were just a number.

I think an option to eliminate the display of the priority code would
satisfy me fine.

> The other advantage to planner-create-task-from-buffer,
> planner-create-note-from-buffer, and planner-diary-add-entry, is that
> they can be called anytime from anywhere in emacs.  The advantage
> being that if you come up with an idea, you do not need to leave your
> context, find todays page, find where on the page to enter it, and
> then get back to where you were.  Planner just does it for you.

This is great, and it's funny that I completely missed this from my
reading of the documentation.

So manual task entry on the plan pages wouldn't replace
planner-create-task-from-buffer, but it might augment it nicely.

-Carl