[emacs-wiki-discuss] Thoughts on org.el

[Sacha Chua]

* Tasks as notes

I've been looking at
http://zon.wins.uva.nl/~dominik/Tools/org/org.el

and I think it handles hierarchies very well by treating tasks as
specially-marked note subtrees. A task is any tree that has "TODO" in
the headline. This makes it easier to have lots of links in a task.
org.el supports deadlines and timestamps.

Do you think tasks-as-notes would fit the way you work?

* One-line links

I somewhat prefer to inline my links, but org.el has a pretty good
idea: put a link on one line and make it span the whole line. One can
put labels before the links instead of in the [[..][wikidescription]]
part. Downside: org doesn't try to get human-friendly annotations. I
like my "Email to ...." links. Should be easy enough to hack that in,
though.

* Storage

org.el encourages you to store everything in one file. Easy to search,
but could be hard if you have lots of DONE tasks and other items you
don't really use but still need to categorize. Possible approach like
PlannerModeCompletedTasks - split off another tree for archived topics
and just link.

I like planner.el's approach of day pages and plan pages. I can see
stuff from different projects on one day, and all my project-relevant
stuff on the project page.

I guess this could be done as views with org's diary integration.

* Scheduling tasks

I like being able to schedule my tasks for different days so that I'm
not overwhelmed by the list of things I need to do. I'm not yet sure
how to do that with org.el. Timestamps, then chronological view? Tasks
don't get automatically carried forward, though. Deadlines might be
useful, but then I see all future tasks anyway. Hmm. Timestamp start,
then use deadline to remind me if it's passed?

Worth checking out. =)

-- 
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