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

[John Sullivan]

Carl Worth <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:37:04 +0900, Sacha Chua wrote:
>> I also strongly recommend that newbies (and everyone, really) post
>> their thoughts and questions on this mailing list, as planner does
>> more than what is officially documented. Perhaps we can eventually put
>> together a FAQ...

> Similarly, there were other parts of planner that just don't fit my
> style. The "A0" prioritization, (can't remember what planner calls
> 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
> small list of related items and directly put them in the order I want. I
> can accept that others have different preferences here, but for me the
> "A0" field is just noise.
>

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

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.

Also, if you put blank lines between groups of tasks, planner will respect
those boundaries.


> So I think my ideal interface to planner mode is actually very simple. I
> would enter tasks directly into a buffer, with some simple structure to
> indicate the beginning of a new task, (say an initial sequence of " _
> "). Then, I could optionally enter categories or dates in () after a
> task, which would make links to dynamically created pages showing tasks
> with matching categories/dates.
>

That might work for you, but I don't understand the advantage. With the current
system, you can just hit enter at the prompts if you don't want to enter the
information at that point. As Sacha pointed out, you can also turn some of the
prompts off. And, the advantage of the prompts is that they give you things to
speed up data entry, like default values so you don't have to type the category
over and over if you want to make multiple tasks with the same category, and
better date navigation, so if you do want to enter a date, you can enter things
like "+7" to schedule the task a week from today, even if you don't know what
the date is, and tab completion on your categories, etc.. 

-- 
[= John Sullivan       =]
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