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

[Sacha Chua]

Maciej Kalisiak <address@hidden> writes:

> Ahhhh! So the workflow becomes: have an idea, scribble it down and
> possibly brainstorm, list any hints or rough task breakdown you see,
> all in a note or two, and then use that as the starting point for
> planning and creating tasks. Kind of different from my previous
> workflow (mostly emacs-wiki + allout outline giving a highly
> annotated and hierarchical todo tree; not very pretty, but sort of
> functional). I think I can work with this, cool. I'll experiment and
> tailor further.

That works perfectly too. Add anchors to your outline with # on the
line before it, and you'll be able to easily jump to your hierarchical
notes.

Come to think of it, planner _does_ support hierarchical tasks that
way... <laugh>

#anchorname
** Some task

#A0 _ Some task [[SomePage#anchorname]] (2004.07.15)

more details here...

*** Other details

#A0 _ Some undated task

You can use M-x planner-jump-to-link on a task to jump to a linked
date or plan page in the parens.

> Right... oh, wanted to confirm, plain ol' Wiki pages under ~/Plan do
> not interfere in any way with the linked system of daily and project
> pages, right?

They're a separate project. I hardly have any plain wiki pages these
days, though... =)

> * I liked the (similar to planner) dual nature of the entries, in
> that they could be presented as entries of a particular day, or of a
> particular subject

Mmm. Yes, I find that very useful. Planner's dual nature is static,
not dynamic, though. On the plus side, it's available even outside
Emacs. On the downside, updates need to get propagated.

> * I liked the searching ability within topics

planner-search-notes and grep provide that sort of functionality. I
also use remembrance-agent to index my notes.

>   - in order to do anything (searches, concatenate previous records
>   for given subject, etc) within records had to start in a records
>   buffer, which often meant I had to first create a blank record for
>   today, something I frequently didn't want to do

I like how I can use a lot of planner things from anywhere. M-x
planner-create-task-from-buffer and M-x remember are meant to be used
from other buffers, actually.

>   - the reindexing was a bit of a pain as I kept the records tree
>   synchronized between my laptop and main machine using CVS (had to
>   do cvs up; records-admin; in Emacs C-c C-z on both machines to
>   assure sync)

We don't have fancy indexing just yet, so simply synchronizing your
plans directory should do the trick.

>   - for some reason I never got comfortable navigating within
>   records; I think it lacked a good overview of the whole database,
>   and of just the topics... records did have the index page, but due
>   to the ugly to parse links to pages it was not very useful; much
>   better would have been overview generated pages which would list
>   the first line of each entry with the link

That's a pretty good idea. There are a number of ways to view an
overview of the records, primarily day-oriented.
planner-notes-index.el lists note titles by day. I need to revive
planner-summary.el at some point in time; that was fun too.
planner-tasks-overview.el gives you tasks, and planner-report does
something similar.

To get an overview of the notes in a page, you could use the contents
tag or the usual allout commands.

> Now, there has been work on records AFAIK, and a version 2 is
> pending, but it's been pending for an aweful long time, and it seems
> it's starting to veer towards becoming a weblog tool (rather than
> general record/log keeping), so I'm jumping ship.

Hmm. What do you mean? <curious> Wouldn't it still support
non-chronological note keeping?

planner + remember (using reverse-chronological notes) is close to
being a weblog, and I've hacked in permalinks in my own config.
Still, planner is flexible enough to be used as anything you want. <grin>

> I do have it setup already. Ah, so the note ALWAYS goes on the daily
> page, and only optionally for the project page, I see. From what I
> understand, the note text is duplicated across both pages, right?
> Hmm, this might be a bit too much duplication for my purposes.

If remember-planner-copy-on-xref-flag is nil, the date page will only
contain a note of the form

.#1 Note headline timestamp ([[LinkToPage#1]])

and the full note will be on the plan page.

> Oh! I've forgot to ask: what is the proper way to update the text of
> a note, so that the pages propagate to the other linked (daily or
> project) page?!

There's a planner-update-note in experimental. If it works for you, I
can move it out of experimental. =)

> Yes, the hyperlinking is there now, but for some reason it still
> keeps using Type 3 fonts (IIRC these are bitmap fonts, hence the
> ugliness; this can be looked up in the acrobat reader under
> File->Doc Props->Fonts; the scalable fonts are Type 1). I'm guessing
> it's the LaTeX/pdfTeX package font setup somehow on the generating

My bad. I'll look up the FAQs later. =) Thanks for pointing this 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