Getting Started with PlannerMuseMode
I’m finally reading Fowler’s excellent My Job Went to Inda and I wonder why I have put it off for so long. I’m slowing integrating some of his suggestions and the first one is the Todo list — keeping track of what I need to do, project planning, etc. Soon these will turn into reports to my manager, but, hey, I’ve only been at this for less than a week.
And I need a Todo list, and, more importantly, I need one that I will look at. My Palm has one, but I don’t look at that enough so I wouldn’t use that. I only use Lotus Notes for email, and it’s bulky anyway. And I had sticky notes and a plain piece of paper would let lost. And they are, like, so last century. No I need my Todos in something that I will look at several times a day. There is really only one tool — Emacs.
I could use just a plain text file, but there are better things out there with Emacs. And I’ve used Planner Mode before with some success, so I decided to give it another try. I quickly learned that Planner Mode is no longer using Emacs-wiki, but Muse. This Planner Muse Mode seems a smoother way. The installation was a bit rough — I don’t think it was documented as well I would have liked. Hence this blog entry. 
I first downloaded both Muse and Planner (see this page) and put them in my ~/emacs directory. I didn’t byte-compile them (but it’s on my todos!) but simply added the following to my Emacs load path:
(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/emacs/muse/lisp"))
(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/emacs/planner"))
I also grabbed the Remember Mode integration from here. This of course, it not necessary.
I was first distraught that C-cC-t didn’t add new tasks like they said, but then I decided I didn’t like that anyway — I kinda what to keep any C-c sequences clean, since I may use a mode that uses that in the future. Since I don’t use F9, I thought that would be a good start to getting to planner. So this is how I have my keys configured now:
(global-set-key (kbd " g”) ‘planner-goto-today)
(global-set-key (kbd “ t”) ‘planner-create-task-from-buffer)
(global-set-key (kbd “ x”) ‘planner-task-done)
(global-set-key (kbd “ y”) ‘planner-goto-yesterday)
So, when I want to create a task, I do f9 t. To see my todos I do f9 g, etc.
I was dismayed by the fact that my Todos didn’t carry over — i.e. what I didn’t do today I wanted to move to tomorrow. This was out of the box with the older version I once used, but it took some digging to get it done with Muse Mode — which is odd, because I called and set the same variables. Probably just my strange thinking. My startup now looks like the following — I have it just after the key setup I listed above:
(setq planner-directory "~/Plans")
(setq planner-project-default-name "WikiPlanner") ;; or whatever name you use in muse-project-alist
(require 'remember)
(require 'remember-planner)
(setq remember-handler-functions '(remember-planner-append))
(setq remember-annotation-functions planner-annotation-functions)
(require 'planner)
(setq planner-carry-tasks-forward t)
I like having my Todo’s appear in a buffer as soon as I start Emacs. So I have this in my last line in my ~/.emacs, which seems to be the only place it works.
(plan)
Though it hasn’t been a week yet, but I really like it. When I think of something I want to do (a work related task, a blog entry, etc.) the first thing I do is make a Todo and keep going on my present task. Then, when I finish my next task, I goto my todos, mark that one as complete and look for my next one. And what I don’t finish automatically gets put into tomorrow’s list. And I can track what I do every day and what I accomplished.
Here is a small WishList of things I will probably work on, sometime, somewhere:
- I have items that I need to do every day. I need to figure out a way to always put them in my todo list.
- Integrate Planner with Remind