Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: planner.el questions, suggestion for planner.pdf

[Yvonne Thomson]

Hi.

I thought I'd throw something in here myself, since I've run into a
slightly similar problem.

Part of what I do is programming, and I've started to want to try and
keep a programmers log of what I'm doing as I'm doing it. This is good
for me as a programmer working on my own with very little real world
contact with other programmers. Sometimes writing down what I'm doing
and the problems that I'm having and what I've already tried is
absolutely invaluable.

I was using planner/remember for this, but I ran into a few problems
with the default way this worked. What I wanted was a hotkey I could hit
to add a note to the log at any time. Remember did this, but I didn't
actually want 20 or more references on a daily page related to programming
tasks. Not to mention it was really one note related to a task, not a
stack of individual notes. I thought of just leaving a remember buffer
open and having a hotkey to jump to that, but there were problems with
that as well. For a start it meant that I couldn't take notes on other
things while I was programming. As someone who's running a small
business and having to take phone calls and that kind of thing while I'm
working, that just wouldn't work. Also, the remember buffer didn't have
a file associated with it, and if emacs crashed for some reason all the
notes would disappear into nowhere. Not much help either. So I hacked
together a solution. I'm still not quite sure how this will work for me,
and it's certainly not ready for anyone else to see, but it's like this.

The way it works is, I mark a task as in progress. This starts
timeclock, which I also find useful to see how long I've been working on
a task. I've created a remember function called remember-log. This
creates a * Log section at the bottom of the project page associated
with this task if it's not already there. Then it does a search in that
log section for the task description of the task I'm working on. If it
doesn't find it, it creates a section for it. Then, finally, after all
that, remember-log appends whatever I've written to that task section
and nowhere else. The headline of the note's just the time. I've also
written a function to jump to a tasks log section if it exists. 

I'll have to work with it for a while to iron the bugs out and see if
this works, but it means that a project page will have tasks, notes
associated with those tasks, and notes about the project as a whole.

It's not exactly the same as what you've been talking about, but it's a
similar problem.