[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: questions from an enthusiastic novice

[Sacha Chua]

Ray Fix <address@hidden> writes:

> I just started using planner over the weekend after discovering it on
> http://www.emacswiki.org/  I must say, I am extremely impressed with
> it.  It is the coolest thing I have seen in quite a while.

Welcome to Planner! I know what you feel. =) I liked it so much that I
volunteered to help John Wiegley with fixes, and he asked me to
maintain it instead. It's a wonderful piece of software and a central
part of my Emacs use.

> 1)  Adding tasks without a date.
> I create a task (C-c C-t C-t), type in the description, then it asks
> me for the date.  Since it is for a project that I might do ...
> someday maybe ... I don't know the date and so I type nil (or
> something)  While this seems to work, is it okay?

This is perfectly all right. You can even type in the task directly,
as it's just plain text anyway. For example:

#A0 _ Take out the trash

>From personal experience, though, undated tasks tend to get forgotten.
If I don't know when I'll start working on a project, I usually
schedule it for some far-off date.

> 2)  Removing the date
> If there is a task that I want to get rid of the date, I go I go to
> the ProjectFile and C-k the date.  Then I go to the Day Planner page
> and wholesale C-k it.  Again, seems to work.  Is it okay?

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! With the latest planner.el
(planner--dev--1.0--patch-41, available on the website at
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/sacha-dev.tar.gz or
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/dev/planner), you can now
specify "nil" when you C-c C-c (planner-copy-or-move-task) a task.

Please check it out. If it works for you too, e-mail me at
address@hidden and I'll merge the fix into stable.

> 3)  Viewing Inline images
> When I add a link:
> [[http://www.bjlug.org/][Boston Japanese LUG]]
> hitting return takes me to the browser and I can see the website.
> Yahoo!
> When I add a picture:
> [ [images/network_config.png] [My Network Configuration] ]
> hitting return opens the file in emacs as a text file.
> Is there a magic spell I can put in my .emacs to change this behavior?

Ahhh. Hmmm. You might want (auto-image-file-mode t). This brought
another feature to mind. =)

* committed address@hidden/emacs-wiki--dev--1.0--patch-16

        * emacs-wiki.el (emacs-wiki-highlight-link): Highlight and publish
        links of the form [[some/link][some/image]]. If you want to include
        ALT text, [[some/link][some/image alt text]].

That'll let people have nice graphical icons in their templates, too.
<muses>

> 4) Listing all of the Tasks Is there a way to list all of the (open)
> tasks in all of the projects. I can probably come up with a perl
> one-liner for doing this but maybe there is a better way. ??

There's

(defun planner-list-unfinished-tasks ()
  "Display all unfinished tasks."
  (interactive)
  (planner-list-tasks-with-status "[^XC]"))

but it only checks the day pages (another good reason to always
schedule your tasks!). It seems difficult to scan project pages and
day pages properly, as we'll have to do a lot of duplicate checking.
Has anyone run into this problem before?

-- 
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