[emacs-wiki-discuss] planner-el 3.26 released

[Sacha Chua]

(Christmas seems to have been moved to January this year. ^_^)

Michael Olson's release announcement prompted me to write a longer one
instead of announcing that oh, hey, a new version of planner--stable
is out, please check the changelog for details. Here's the really short
summary of changes:

  * New upstream release planner--stable--1.0--patch-111.
  * NEW: planner-multi.el: support for multiple plan pages for tasks and notes.
  * NEW: planner-xtla.el: support for Tom Lord's Arch version control system
  * NEW: planner-replan-note command
  * NEW: planner-bookmark-add-note-title-flag user option
  * NEW: planner-use-plan-pages user option
  * NEW: planner-create-task-from-buffer-hook
  * NOTE: PlannerMode.info renamed to planner-el.info
  * Bugfix: planner-timeclock-summary-day-range-entry and nil plan pages.
  * Bugfix: planner-bibtex-browse-url and labels with :.
  * Bugfix: planner-markup-note and obsolete emacs-wiki-bare-anchor-prefix
  * planner-deadline-change now adds deadlines to tasks.
  * planner-mhe now uses message IDs.

Okay, what does that mean? Here are the major things introduced
in this release.

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Multiple plan pages with planner-multi.el
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You can now play around with multiple plan pages for tasks and notes.
You can use this to group your tasks into arbitrary categories. GTD[1]
geeks can go wild with contexts and folders, grouping together phone
calls on the "@phone" page, etc. Franklin-Covey people can label their
tasks "important". [1] David Allen's Getting Things Done method.

This also improves support for short tags, encouraging you to have
easy-to-read names like "planner" instead of "PlannerModeMaintenance".
That's the reason why my tasks on http://sacha.free.net.ph/ are
starting to resemble my bookmarks on http://del.icio.us/sachac .

Caveat: it gets confused when you create a link from something that
has an embedded space in it, so links from info pages and Windows
directories with spaces may confuse it. Change planner-multi-separator
to something weird if you make lots of links with spaces.

Right now I've shoehorned the functionality in through lots of
defadvice. Please try it out. Once I've figured out how to get it to
tell the difference between autogenerated links with spaces and typed
links that use spaces to separate entries, I'm planning to merge the
code into planner.el. (Defadvice within a single package is just weird.)

planner-multi.el tries very hard not to mess up normal links, so you
can mix multiple plan pages with single plan pages.

This is by no means perfect, but my system still seems to be okay, and
I haven't tweaken planner-multi in a few days. If paranoid, keep
backups.

I really like this feature. =)

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planner-use-plan-pages
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On the other end of the spectrum, planner can now be used _without
plan pages,_ thus proving that planner is a PIM with multiple
personality disorder. Yes, you can turn plan pages off almost
completely--well, as far as I know. If you set planner-use-plan-pages
to nil, Planner won't prompt you for a plan page when you create tasks
or notes. Why? Just in case you want to have only daily entries, I
suppose... If you set this to nil, you may want to make sure that
planner-use-day-pages is non-nil. ;)

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And for the procrastinators in all of us: default dates!
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If you set 'planner-expand-name-default' to nil, created tasks will be
undated by default. Don't forget to associate them with plan pages you
check fairly often, though! =)

Naturally, you'll need a way to refer to today. "." in a date prompt
means schedule it today (although planner.el won't blame you if you
don't get around to doing it anyway).

Chronic procrastinators can set this to things like "+1" to schedule
most tasks for a day into the future by default. John Sullivan uses
+2, for example. ("I'll do that the day after tomorrow...")

Oops. Right. I'm supposed to be talking about how planner.el can help
make you more productive, not help you procrastinate...

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Documentation updates! =)
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... so to help you learn more about Planner.el so that you can do
incredibly cool stuff with it, I've rewritten large chunks of the
Planner manual. (And renamed it to planner-el instead of PlannerMode
so that people don't go "huh?")

The Quick Start has been overhauled, notes about Remember have been
added, some of the modules have been reorganized, and it _should_ be
somewhat better for light reading now.

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Coming up soon!
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I really want to get some kind of icalendar export, import and merge
feature going so that we can have Planner sync with PDAs. I tried
looking at multisync's source code, but the C for the Evolution
backend zonked my brain. I'm going to work on exporting

I'm also really looking forward to tweaking Planner to fit _you_ even
better, or convince you to try it out if you're not on Planner yet.
^_^ Have any productivity tips you'd like to share with other Planner
users? Have any particularly nifty code from your configuration? Looking
for a feature or script that could make your life easier? Speak up! =)

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, CS ed
sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83