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

[Sacha Chua]

John Sullivan <address@hidden> writes:

> I believe someone has hacked their Planner to not display the priority
> information, but I can't remember who at the moment.

I was about to implement this feature by redefining
planner-format-task. I brought up the code and realized there was
already support for it: planer-use-task-numbers. The ChangeLog says I
hacked it in as patch-160 on 2004-08-16. It's documented in the manual
under "Task Numbering." I'm somewhat embarrassed. I should probably
print out and go over all the planner source code once a month, or
something like that. =) At least my instincts were correct, or at the
very least consistent--I headed for the same function I modified last
time! <laugh>

We make planner simpler not by removing features, but by using
reasonable defaults and writing good documentation. Simple
documentation. Stuff that doesn't fit into the documentation, like
this documented-but-forgotten feature, well... can't do much about
that, but having one logical place to twiddle that behavior made it
easy to find the feature again.

How do big software projects deal with this growth of features?

> You can turn off automatic sorting with (setq
> planner-sort-tasks-automatically nil). I think it still assigns the
> numbers, but it won't rearrange your list.

Turn off planner-renumber-tasks-automatically as well, then. =)

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
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