Howm

I've wanted to post a bit about my Emacs experiments. I've tried three "PIMs" at this point: Planner-mode, Org-mode, and Howm. All three are interesting and have their uses. You can find a lot online about planner-mode, so I won't spend much time with it here. Org-mode is sort of an outliner on steriods. You can pull todos out of it and it has an interesting table feature. But today, I want to talk about howm. You're not going to find much online about it. There's an unfinished tutorial that helped me a lot. I'm still trying to figure things out. In the meantime, I'm posting a couple of images so you can see what it looks like. The first one is howm-menu, which is the main interface.


The bracketed words across are clickable "buttons". When you use howm, it creates a new text file, stored in a special directory. It searches files in this directory. The file names are basically date stamps. You can create a new file immediately after your first one and it will have a different stamp. (You can also concatenate files.) You can type in anything you want. You use special tags to flag an item as a todo or scheduled appointment. Howm will pull all of those together and display them in the menu. Basically, you can open a single file, type in whatever you want and howm will sort things out for you. You can also tag it with keywords, which are indicated by >>> in front of a word. You can use multiple tags, which the original tutorial calls "aliases", and Howm will pull up your item in a search of any of them. There's another way to tag items using <<<. Howm calls these go-to and come-from links. You can input recurring todos too. Howm has a way of sorting todos that reminds me of Life Balance. You can tag a defered todo by using a ~ after the date stamp. If you put a number after that, the deferred item will rise to the top of your list every x number of days then float back down to the bottom. Todos are set to rise and float down on your list depending on the type of item. Appointments can be either scheduled or deadlines. Howm also supports links of all sorts.

I'll show you another example. I've talked about using Accounts and Loans on my Palm for my check register. It has a great feature where it will export the registry by account into memos. The downside is that it's not easy to search the database for a transaction without doing an export. Sometimes I want to find out if I've re-entered a transaction by mistake. I've tried moving the data into a spreadsheet but it just seems like work. Today, I tried copying those memos into a single howm file. Here's the result:


I did a search of an amount in my file. The top buffer shows the results, giving me a list of all the times it found that amount. The bottom buffer is the display of the top file, with each instance of my search highlighted. If I were to click on the other files at the top, the bottom buffer would display them in turn. This is going to be really handy for me and a lot easier for my ageing computer to handle than Open Office.

The original Howm tutorial is here.
This is very helpful too. Emacs will run on just about everything except Palms. I'm finding this to be an amazingly useful Emacs mode and it's certainly helping me learn how to use Emacs as well.