[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: getting organized...

[Sacha Chua]

To the wonderful people on emacs-wiki:

   Here's a draft of a getting-started-with-planner doc. As you can
   see, it's quite bare. It's 1:00 am and I really should be sleeping.
   <laugh> I dumped the text onto
   http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki?PlannerModeQuickStart and
   would really, really, really appreciate it if you help format it
   nicely and fill in your own notes. Thanks!

"Paul Lussier" <address@hidden> writes:

You might be interested in our mailing list at
address@hidden . That way, you can find out how other
people use emacs-wiki and planner! =)

Here, I'll assume that you're interested in planner for project
planning (keeping track of TODOs and project-related notes).

================================================================
GETTING STARTED WITH PLANNER (draft; feedback much appreciated!)
================================================================

At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to use planner.el
and related modules to keep track of your tasks, schedules and notes,
all within the convenience of Emacs. =)

Outline:

I.   Getting the files

II.  Planning your day
     1. Tasks
     2. Schedule
     3. Notes

III. Wiki

IV.  Organizing projects

V.   Advanced stuff

----------------------------------------------------------------
I. GETTING THE FILES
----------------------------------------------------------------

You can get the latest archive of development files at
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/emacs-wiki-dev.tar.gz

You can download individual files at
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/

If you have the arch version control system, you can issue the
following commands to retrieve the latest version.

   tla register-archive address@hidden \
                        http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/arch

   tla get address@hidden/emacs-wiki--sacha--1.0 emacs-wiki

Planner.el is available as planner-el on Debian systems.

Please e-mail me at address@hidden if you need help getting
the files. =)

----------------------------------------------------------------
II. PLANNING YOUR DAY
----------------------------------------------------------------

There are two kinds of pages in a Planner wiki.

      Day pages:     Show tasks, schedule, and notes for the day
      Plan pages:    Organize tasks and related notes into notes

We'll start by using day pages. Put this in your .emacs and
evaluate it.

    (add-to-list 'load-path "/directory/with/emacs-wiki")
    (require 'planner)
    (plan)

This will bring up the most recent day page with unfinished tasks or
create a new day page if necessary. By default, planner pages are
stored in ~/Plans (planner-directory), and published HTML pages are
stored in ~/WebWiki (planner-publishing-directory).

-----------------------------
TASKS
-----------------------------

CREATING TASKS

>From the day page, type C-c C-t (planner-create-task-from-buffer) to
create a new task. Fill in a short description and choose a date. You
have created your first task.

   Tip: I bind planner-create-task-from-buffer to F9 t so that I can
   easily call it from anywhere. You can do that with this elisp
   fragment: (global-set-key (kbd "<f9> r") 'remember-to-planner)

You can create other tasks and change their priority. #A tasks are
important, #B are medium-priority, and #C are low-priority. Whenever
you save the file or call M-x planner-renumber-tasks, the tasks are
numbered according to their priority and their order. Higher-priority
tasks are listed above higher-priority tasks, and completed tasks are
listed at the bottom.

To remind yourself to do tasks in a certain order, simply edit the
lines so that they're in the order you want.

MARKING A TASK AS COMPLETED

Tasks that are unfinished are marked with _ (underscore).
Tasks that are finished are marked with X (capital X).
This is an example of a high-priority task that is unfinished.

   #A1 _ Write a tutorial

This is an example of a high-priority task that is finished.

   #A1 X Write a tutorial

You can either edit the status yourself, or type C-c C-x while the
point is on the task line.

RESCHEDULING TASKS

To reschedule a task to a different day, type C-c C-c
(planner-copy-or-move-task) and select a new date.

RESCHEDULING MANY TASKS

You can mark a region and type M-x planner-copy-or-move-region to
reschedule all the contained tasks to a different date.

DELETING TASKS

Either delete the line containing the task or call M-x
planner-delete-task .

CARRYING OVER UNFINISHED TASKS

(plan) brings you back to the most recent day with unfinished tasks.
If you want (plan) to always bring you to today's page, carrying over
unfinished tasks automatically, add

   (setq planner-carry-tasks-forward t)

to your .emacs.

-----------------------------
SCHEDULE
-----------------------------

This is pretty free-form. I usually have entries of the form

hh:mm | hh:mm | activity
hh:mm | hh:mm | activity
hh:mm | hh:mm | activity

where hh:mm are expressed in 24h time. You can put anything in this
section.

-----------------------------
NOTES
-----------------------------

You can put anything in this section. Notes added by remember-planner.el
look like this:

.#1 Headline
Body

and are outlined at the H3 level. If you want to take notes
conveniently, check out remember-planner.el (see Getting the Files).

----------------------------------------------------------------
III. WIKI
----------------------------------------------------------------

All the pages in your wiki can contain links of the form WikiName,
[[destination]], or [[destination][description]].

See the comments in emacs-wiki.el for more details (particularly about
anchors).

----------------------------------------------------------------
IV. ORGANIZING PROJECTS
----------------------------------------------------------------
(still needs lots of writing)

Create a LearnPlanner page inside your wiki. From this page, create a
task called "Organize tasks into project pages." Schedule it for today.
LearnPlanner should now look something like this:

   * Tasks

   #A0 _ Organize tasks into project pages. (yyyy.mm.dd)

   * Notes

If you select the date, it will bring up the associated daily page.

   * Tasks

   #A0 _ Organize tasks into project pages. (LearnPlanner)

   * Schedule

   * Notes

Try rescheduling the task to another date. LearnPlanner is updated
automatically.

----------------------------------------------------------------
V. ADVANCED STUFF
----------------------------------------------------------------

Join our mailing list at address@hidden and ask
questions, report bugs, or swap stories about how you use emacs-wiki,
planner, remember, and related libraries! =)

For example, I maintain my blog at http://sacha.free.net.ph/ with the
help of emacs-wiki planner remember remember-planner remember-bbdb
planner-rss planner-gnus planner-experimental planner-id planner-w3m
planner-bbdb. My config can be found at
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/ .

> In other words, I have a very hier-archical organization to my stuff :)

You can keep the hierarchical organization of your documents - no need
to move them all into your planner page. When you need them, you can
refer to them using hyperlinks that look like this:

[[../work][Work directory]]

[[/home/pll/work/foo.txt][Technical specification]]

> With emacs-wiki, it appears that I can have mini-wikis everywhere, no?
> And, how do I cross reference all of them back to a single location 
> for the purpose of publishing them on the web?

You don't have to have multiple wikis. =) You can have just one for
now, if you want.

> Is it such that when I export to HTML, the html files all get dumped 
> in a pre-specified directory somewhere of my choosing?

Yup!

> A good idea, but what happens when your tasks have sub-tasks?
> For example, in emacs-outline mode there are infinitely deep headings
> to denote ideas using multiple asterisks.

John Wiegley suggested breaking it down until you couldn't break it
down into smaller bites (without stating the obvious, that is). You
can still put your notes in a hierarchy in the * Notes section, and
allout lends itself very well to that.

If you find that you have pretty big parts of your project, you can
break the parts into their own plan pages, but I haven't really run
into that situation yet. =)

> I certainly don't need the Gantt Chart (but wow! wouldn't *that* be 
> neat :) capability, but I think it would be interesting to somehow 
> denote parallellism and dependancy meta-data about different tasks.

<muses> This might actually be possible with task IDs. Using the
priorities would be too fragile, but this is actually a perfect fit
for the GUIDs that are there...

> Hmmm, I'll have to give this some thought.  Off the top of my head, 
> I'm thinking of another field where something simple like 'P' for 
> parallel and 'D' for dependancy.  From my previous example wrt 

Hey, that's a cool idea. We can even do parent tasks this way. We
should probably stick the parallel/dependency information near the end
of the task, though, so you can easily see the task descriptions.

I feel my graph theory lessons coming out...

>   Sacha> What would an ideal interface for you be?
> I'm not sure what you mean.

Would you like Emacs to suggest what task to do next or what task to
do in parallel? (This seems something that a human can pretty easily
do, though.)

Would you want it to automatically sort the tasks in topological order
so that tasks are listed only after all their dependencies?

Do you want to hit a key and see all the unfinished tasks whose
dependencies are fulfilled? =)

> I discovered that this morning, though I have yet to try it.  How do 
> you export to PHP? Is there some emacs-wikil-php.el I need for that?

Oh, I just changed my header, my footer, and my
emacs-wiki-publishing-file-suffix for my planner wiki. Relevant
snippets are in my
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/planner-config.el . =)

> Thanks. I should probably join your mailing list, huh? :)

I've plugged it a few times through this message, yeah... =)

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - Ateneo CS faculty geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun
http://sacha.free.net.ph/