[Remind-Fans] awkward PRIORITY sort order of timed and non-timed reminders

[Ian! D. Allen]

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 08:27:23AM -0400, Dianne Skoll wrote:
> It's mentioned in "SORTING REMINDERS", though.

A cross-reference to that under "PRIORITY" would be helpful.
Also: It says "priority" not "PRIORITY" (upper-case) so my man page
search didn't find it.  (Searching in "less" for upper-case does not
include lower-case.)  The -g description also uses "priority" not
"PRIORITY'; searching for "PRIORITY" didn't find it.

Wherever you use only lower-case "priority" in the man page, please change
it to upper-case or have an upper-case PRIORITY nearby so searches can
find it.

> My original thought was that timed reminders should come first
> to group together things you have to do at a certain time, followed
> by "all-day" reminders that are less likely to require action.

Very reasonable; please put this information into the man page so we know.

> The -g option to remind lets you change the sort order of individual
> fields, but doesn't let you change the order in which the fields
> are considered.  I can look at making it more flexible for a future release.

Yes, please.  I suppose my only work-around is that I have to make *all*
my reminders into timed reminders so that they sort the way I want.

I see that -b controls the presence of a leading time field in the
calendar output, but I don't see a corresponding control for a leading
time field in the text output.  It appears I have to explicitly include
the time in the message text of the reminder if I want the time to
appear in my email each morning; I don't see a corresponding option to
automatically enable times.  Since I don't want the time to appear twice
in the calendar I have to hide the second one outside %":

REM 2015-05-25 at 10:30 MSG [trigtime()] %"Meeting%" %b%

It would be nicer if there were some option similar to -b that controlled
how the time could be output preceding the text output lines, so I could
write just this uncluttered message text and let remind do all the time
work for both calendars and text:

REM 2015-05-25 at 10:30 MSG %"Meeting%" %b%

To be more general, it would be nice if remind had a way of having
msgprefix() process "[trigtime()]" through the substitution filter so
that I could specify any arbitrary expression to appear in front of my
reminders (and use calprefix() to do the same for the calendar).

-- 
| Ian! D. Allen  -  idallen at idallen.ca  -  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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