[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Daily page vs. project page

[Sacha Chua]

address@hidden writes:

> On my daily page, I want to create a task which refers to a project 
> page.  For example I'd like to see:
> Then, on the PayBills project page, I'd like to enter a bunch of 
> tasks:

What would be a nice way of supporting hierarchical tasks? I strongly
feel that we need to support hierarchical tasks, but am not sure as to
what would be a good interface for them. How will they be represented
in text? How will they appear onscreen?

Currently, project pages give us minimal support for hierarchical
tasks. For example, you could have

#A0 _ SomeProject (SomeProject)

and in SomeProject have lots of little tasks. However, if these are
scheduled on days, the day page gets really cluttered as pll observed.

What would be a nice way of dealing with this?

Personally, I think I would like

#A0 _ [+] Pay bills

where [+] is a link. Selecting it would result in this view:

#A0 _ [-] Pay bills
#A0 _     > Electric bill
#A0 _     > Water bill
#A0 _     > Phone bill
#A0 X     > Cable bill

and selecting the [-] again will collapse the view. However, that
means that:

(a) planner-renumber-tasks has to be vewy, vewy careful not to break
apart tasks like this.

(b) things get weird when a task is partially complete. What should
happen in this case, if the cable bill is paid but the others haven't
been yet?

Here's another way to represent it:

#A0 _ Pay bills
#A0 _ Pay bills: Electric bill
#A0 _ Pay bills: Water bill
#A0 _ Pay bills: Phone bill
#A0 X Pay bills: Cable bill

and we can have special highlighting for this so that if a task has
the same prefix as the previous task, it gets hidden.

#A0 _ [+3] Pay bills
(three incomplete subtasks)

When exposed, it'll look something like this:

#A0 _ [- ] Pay bills
#A0 _        Electric bill
#A0 _        Water bill
#A0 _        Phone bill
#A0 X        Cable bill

Downside:

Display will no longer be the same as the underlying text page. Hmm.

What about if we still display the task prefix, but we color it differently?

Hidden:

#A0 _ Pay bills [+3]

Shown:

#A0 _ Pay bills [-3]
#A0 _ Pay bills: Electric bill
#A0 _ Pay bills: Water bill
#A0 _ Pay bills: Phone bill
#A0 X Pay bills: Cable bill

(Imagine the "pay bills" in darkgray on black or something like that.)

I still don't know if there's an elegant way to deal with this...
-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - Ateneo CS faculty geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C