Re: Full-screen editor in /bin
Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net> writes:
> He might not, but I'd certainly be interested. Could you post some
> details?
Sure. 8^) I recently ditched my Palm III. I'm nearly always near
my laptop, and the Palm was bulky enough that I wasn't carrying it
the rare times I wasn't with the laptop. So most of my access to my
addressbook and calendar was on the computer.
I'd been using JPilot, which was very stable, but the UI leaves a bit
to be desired and it had no integration with any other program at
all, so I was keeping a separate set of address info in my Emacs BBDB.[1]
Add that to the list of phone numbers in my cell phone and I was
keeping stuff all over the place.
On my calendar, I didn't have much complaint about JPilot, but it was
something of a pain to enter in holidays, since the Palm doesn't know
them. Ditto DST, ditto all sorts of things. When I found myself
entering holidays from Emacs into the Palm, I realized it was
probably time to switch.
So I now use Emacs's calendar mode.[2] It knows a lot more about
calendars than the Palm does. It knows about most common holidays
in the US calendar, and you can also turn on Jewish and Islamic
holidays. (Probably more, too.) I can enter my appointments in a
very easy manner in ~/diary:
Aug 6, 2002 10:00am Arch Wireless call
12:00pm Lunch
Emacs will beep me before the appointment. I can also enter block
stuff (ie, Palm's daily repeating), floating dates, my own holidays,
anniversaries, etc. It's got some neat things:
%%(diary-anniversary 4 30 1951) Dad's %d%s birthday
The %d%s will evaluate to what birthday is is. This year, it said
Dad's 51st birthday
I can also make entries that show up on whatever days I can program,
with Emacs Lisp. I could (but haven't gotten around to) write one
showing when payday is, for instance.
I recently added support for coloring appointments like
diary-anniversary in the calendar by passing another argument to the
form. So birthdays are a light brown, days I'm on call are
underlined in red, vacations are a caribbean blue, etc. (This will
be included in Emacs 21.4.
That's the nice thing about Emacs, it's very malleable. It's easy to
get it to do whatever you want once you understand some lisp.
Footnotes:
[1] http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs-21.2/html_chapter/emacs_32.html#SEC412
--
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
Nothing beats Windows, it keeps loading and loading and loading and
Reply to: