[emacs-wiki-discuss] planner-multi.el and misplaced tasks

[Curran Nachbar]

Hi,

I am trying out PlannerMode and especially planner-multi for the first 
time, thanks to John Anderson's excellent GTD recommendation (found via 
43F). So far so good and I'm sure it will get better once I learn (or 
bind) more shortcuts. I've been using (X)Emacs for several years, though I 
don't hack it. Thanks for putting this together and making it open source. 
It's clearly a labor of love!

There's some odd behavior, though, which is unpredictable enough that 
right now I can't trust the system to capture everything. I want to assign 
a task to multiple pages (e.g. @Home, Crochet) with a date of "nil". 
Great, it shows up on both pages, although it has two entries for Crochet 
(I was on the "Crochet" page when I did C-c C-t).:

#B   _ begin red afghan : Crochet (Crochet @Home)

Next I navigate to the @Home plan page, and realize I need to add an entry 
to @Phone. So I C-c C-t, name the task, nil the date, and list "@Phone" 
for the plans. The task is created and does NOT show up on the current 
page (@Home). But when I switch to the @Phone page, the task I just 
created shows up as:

#B   _ call so and so : @Home

This seems to be some kind of default "include the current page" 
behavior, but in the second case, it's clearly missing the page I 
*told* it to use -- though that page contains the task! Did I set myself 
up wrong in the first place? Here's how I set up PlannerMode:

-- downloaded the stable package from Sacha's site, tar xzf into ~/emacs
-- added the following four lines to my .emacs:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/emacs-wiki/")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/planner/")
(require 'planner)
(require 'planner-multi)
-- fired up GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i586-pc-linux-gnu) and typed M-x plan

If it's always going to include the current plan page, I guess I could 
always navigate to "today" before creating new tasks. (Tasks created from 
today's page look just right.) But right now, the "add current page" 
behavior seems unusable -- if I list the current page in the 
space-delimited plans list, I get it twice (first example), and if I 
don't, I get it as the ONLY entry with the task on the page I do specify 
(and that page ISN'T listed). Can't win?

I am perfectly happy to attribute this to my having the wrong mental model 
of how planner multi mode is supposed to work... but until I understand it 
I can't really use it. Help???

Curran