[emacs-wiki-discuss] RE: Making planner simpler

[Raymond Zeitler]

Sacha wrote on Sun, 12 Dec 2004 at 01:13:40 +0900:

> Many non-Emacs users believe that Emacs is confusing and scary, but
> powerful. The same is starting to be said of Planner. [snip]

> This impression is not helped by the fact that my website has a
> gazillion tasks and hyperlinks. [snip]

Your web page is... er... overwhelming.  But we expect that from an
"open source geekette" who was/is the maintainer. :)

> I'd like to make it easy to get started with planner. When people are
> used to (plan) as the last thing in their ~/.emacs, _then_ we show
> them all the other funky stuff, which is all optional anyway. Must
> make it clear that people happily use Planner without Gnus,
> without publishing, without plan pages, without hyperlinks, without
> remember, without detailed plans, etc...

> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerModeMethods tries to be a
> step in the (right?) direction. What else can we do to make it easier?

The web page you refer isn't what I'd hit prospective Planner users
with initially.  Instead, I recommend the Quick Start Guide, which
helped me get started only a few months ago.  (I'd suggest that the
"arch version control system" text be replaced with a link to a
separate page that would contain the text.)

> I'm thinking of turning off plan pages by default so that newbies
> don't have to worry about things like "TaskPool". It'll be like the
> way we have an option to turn off day pages. This will probably be
> controlled by a variable called planner-use-plan-pages . However, I
> can't set it for newbies without surprising the heck out of everyone
> else, so... umm... have any ideas on how to go about doing this?

Emacs "protects" users from certain keystrokes.  For example, when a
"newbie" presses C-x C-u, Emacs won't invoke upcase-region.  Instead,
it will display some message about the keystroke being disabled, and
if you really want to run it, then let me know.  Perhaps a similar
facility might be added to Planner?

I don't think newbies need to be "protected" or "sheltered" from plan
pages.  The feature is well-documented.  But thanks for the warning!

> Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
> http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
> interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, CS ed
> applying as a Debian new maintainer | looking for a grad school

I hope you make it into MIT.  Then you'll only be about two hours away
from us, and you can give us Planner presentations in your spare time!
:-)

-- 
Raymond Zeitler <address@hidden>