[Remind-Fans] basing task recurrance schedule on completed date/time

[Paul M Foster]

Jon Garvin wrote:
> I've been on the quest for my personal holy grail of task reminder
> tools  for quite some time.  I saw a mention of 'Remind' on linux .com
> today and spent a while browsing the remind wiki and mailing list
> archives sceptically optimistic.  The  fact that  Remind has an actual
> scripting language suggests that what I need to do might actually be
> possible here, but I don't see a specific mention of it anywhere, so... 
> if someone could simply tell me either "No, Outlook is still the only
> software that does that well." or "Sure, that's easy, go check out 'this
> link'." I'd greatly appreciate it.
> 
> What I need is to have a task, let's say "Mow the lawn," that doesn't
> necessarily NEED to happen on the day the reminder triggers. Maybe it's
> raining, or I've got other plans, or it doesn't really need it yet, or
> it's just too damn hot.  So, I put it off for a couple days, or even
> until next week.  What I do NOT need to is put it off six days and then
> on the 7th get another reminder telling me to do it all over again.
> Instead, once I do finally get it done, I want to automatically schedule
> a new reminder for, let's say, one week from the time that I completed
> it this time.  Outlook does this extremely well, but I have yet to find
> anything for linux that does this right. Maybe Remind does, and I've
> just been oblivious this whole time? I've got my fingers crossed.
> 

I'm just a user, not one of the programmers. If programmers or power 
users disagree, I bow to them.

Remind isn't designed to do this by itself. Remind is really designed 
for showing reminders, as dictated in its config file. As such, there 
isn't a process native to Remind that insists you acknowledge the 
completion of a task in order to drop or reschedule the reminder. In 
other words, there is no two-way communication process native to Remind. 
You put a task or event into the ~/.reminders file with the appropriate 
syntax, and it reminds you on the appropriate day (or perhaps before, 
depending on the way you set it up). In fact, I don't even think 
follow-on products like Wyrd and TkRemind will do what you want.

That said, however, it is possible to execute what you're trying to do. 
It does require some programming, though. TkRemind displays a calendar 
populated by Remind events. The way TkRemind does this is to call Remind 
with certain parameters, which dumps out a text file, formatted in a 
certain way. TkRemind reads that text file and parses it to display an 
actual GUI calendar of the events. I myself have written some PHP 
scripts to generate a similar calendar using the same original text 
file. Theoretically, you could do something like this, but in *your* 
software, insist that certain tasks nag you until done or until you 
reschedule them. This may be more trouble than you want to go to, but I 
suspect it is possible.

There may well be other Linux programs which do this exact thing better. 
You might try searching at freshmeat.net using keywords like "remind", 
"reminders", "task manager", "tasks", etc.

The upsides of Remind are twofold: 1) the flexibility of its output, and 
2) the flexibility of its input. I have never found a tool that compares 
with Remind in its ability to specify any dated event, regardless of how 
complex the data calculation of the event is. But it's not really what 
I'd call a "task manager".

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster