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

Ian! D. Allen idallen at idallen.ca
Sun May 24 23:36:38 EDT 2015


I find it very unhelpful that "remind -p" outputs all timed reminders
before all non-timed reminders in calendars, no matter what the PRIORITY
field says.  (This isn't mentioned under "PRIORITY" in the man page.)

Why is this behaviour useful in a calendar?

PRIORITY on non-timed reminders organizes the reminders within the
calendar day, but timed reminders ignore that and use PRIORITY to organize
the timed reminders within each minute.  You can't get timed and non-timed
reminders to play nicely together in a calendar day.  This input file:

REM [today()]       PRIORITY 0001 MSG Hello 1
REM [today()]@23:49 PRIORITY 0002 MSG Hello 2
REM [today()]       PRIORITY 0003 MSG Hello 3
REM [today()]@23:49 PRIORITY 0004 MSG Hello 4

gives this unhelpful mixed-up output of "remind -p":

2015/05/01 * * * 1429 11:49pm Hello 2
2015/05/01 * * * 1429 11:49pm Hello 4
2015/05/01 * * * * Hello 1
2015/05/01 * * * * Hello 3

What I want is remind to use the PRIORITY I specify and output this:

2015/05/01 * * * * Hello 1
2015/05/01 * * * 1429 11:49pm Hello 2
2015/05/01 * * * * Hello 3
2015/05/01 * * * 1429 11:49pm Hello 4

The overall sort for a calendar day should interleave timed and non-timed
reminders using their PRIORITY fields.

If remind would just output the PRIORITY field in the output somewhere,
I could re-sort the output file to fix the problem, but it doesn't.

-- 
| Ian! D. Allen  -  idallen at idallen.ca  -  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
| Home Page: http://idallen.com/   Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/
| College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/
| Defend digital freedom:  http://eff.org/  and have fun:  http://fools.ca/


More information about the Remind-fans mailing list