Emacs update

I've tested the three basic planning tools in Emacs: Planner, Org, and Howm. I've learned a lot about Emacs. I continue to use my Palm and JPilot for my day to day stuff. But I've been searching for a tool that would let me sit at the computer and just plan things out. I'm still not sure that I've found a comfortable fit.

Howm, which I've blogged about before, is my favorite. I like the idea of having low priority items float up and down the list. You're reminded of the item but don't have it in front of you all the time.I like the way it can pull information from any of the files in your directory. The downside is that it's hard to figure out how to use it. There's not much documentation on it and the mailing list is way too quiet.If I make a list of items on my Palm and then copy the list to howm, some of the items won't work. And I can't see any reason why they don't work. It's just too frustrating.

Org is a great outliner and gives you a nice agenda view. And you can use spreadsheet style tables in your documents. Most of the options are on the menu, so you can learn the key commands as you go. It is probably the best GTD tool of the lot, since you can set up both context and status tags and it supports multiple tags. You can export to html or ical formats too. I've managed to export through Plucker and onto my Palm. And the mailing list is active and there is a lot of development in progress. The biggest downside for me is that it's an outline. I find outlines limiting somehow. I'd deleted my original outline and couldn't work up the enthusiasm to create a new one. That's just a personal preference and it may be the perfect tool for you.

Then there's Planner. It has good support and lots of documentation. Best of all, there are a lot of little scripts to hook Planner into all manner of tools like BBDB, Gnus, and W3m. It's stable and configurable. It's possible to use day pages in connection with project pages or you can use a single page. The downside for me is that most of the functions aren't obvious. The menu is very brief. I am still trying to figure out how to get a week view, instead of having to scroll through the pages to find stuff. (And I have a script for this, I just haven't figured it out yet.) I also haven't figured out how to push the someday/maybe stuff out of the way so the task lists are overwhelming. (I'm trying to date those items for the next weekly review. I'm sure there's a better fix.)

To my surprise, I'm using Planner for now. I don't want any structure for my lists as most of what I have to do are a lot of overwhelming projects that don't need to be done by a particular date. And I don't have a lot of time to try and figure things out. I just want to make a quick entry and be done with it. For right now, this seems to work. I do miss howm, so I have to make myself just use the tool in front of me and move on.

Comment postings

I've had to turn off comments on the previous post due to porn spam. And I've turned on moderation of comments. It truly is a shame that you can't post anything on the internet these days without having some sort of invitation to porn being sent to it. So, if you had any questions about howm, please post to this post instead.