Migs, the one who wrote in recently about non-working Year2003, Year2002 and Year2001 links, has this to ask:

I’m very curious as to how you get so much done with a console based (?) text editor. Like do you have sort of summary view of your calendar, tasks, etc in emacs? Maybe you can post a few screenshots of what you look at everyday. Personally, I’d be lost without an app like Evolution or Korganizer. I can’t imagine how you manage all that with emacs.

Migs, that is precisely it. =) planner.el is an Emacs module that gives me a summary view of my tasks, schedule, and notes inside Emacs (which incidentally has a nice graphical interface, too). Together with emacs-wiki.el, it lets me easily manage my website. Another ultra-handy thing is M-x remember from remember.el, which pops up a buffer asking me what I want to remember and stores a note in my daily planner page. For example, this is one such note created by remember.el. A patch contributed by Thomas Gehrlein allows easy navigation of planner pages – simply select dates from M-x calendar.

Personally, I prefer this text-file-based system to Evolution or Korganizer. I remember dropping down to M-x grep to quickly search for something in my daily planner files. I can backup my data files in a .tar.gz. I can perform diffs and version control (although I haven’t gotten around to doing so yet! =) ). I can even run it in conjunction with the Remembrance Agent.

My tasks and notes can be linked to my address book through BBDB integration with Planner, and I’ve modified the BBDB url support to take advantage of certain fields in my database. For example, typing Sacha Chua results in the following link: Sacha Chua. Locally, this brings up the address book record that matches that regular expression. On the Web, it is transformed into a URL following these rules of preference: blog, web, e-mail. That allows me to link to other people and even sites much more easily than HTML or the usual blogging systems might let me do, since HTML and http://www.blogger.com still require me to type the URLs to which I want to link.

Because all of these things run inside GNU Emacs, I can easily access all of my data. I can embed Emacs LISP code into my planner files and have them automatically evaluated and displayed. I can switch to my planner file easily from my IRC chat session or from my mail. I can hook into built-in Emacs functionality or make use of modules developed by other people. It’s tons of fun!

And I didn’t even write planner.el. Ubercoder John Wiegley did. I discovered planner.el around 2001.11.03. I liked it so much I e-mailed John Wiegley to volunteer tech support and bugfixing for it, and he suggested that I take over maintaining planner.el instead. (2002.11.21) Open source is so much fun! =)

To see a sample of the text files I work with, you can check out my planner directory at http://richip.dhs.org/~sachac/notebook/plans/ . The published files are listed at http://richip.dhs.org/~sachac/notebook/wiki/WikiIndex.php.

People interested in duplicating my setup may want to check out my configuration files. They are all found in my notebook/emacs/ directory. Files of interest are planner-config.el, emacs-wiki-config.el, and remember-config.el. Please write to me at sacha@free.net.ph if you have any comments or suggestions, and don’t hesitate to ask for help in setting up a wonderful personal information management system in Emacs.