Hi Samuel,
I have now read through your proposal. To me it seems that
using ID's is the best way forward. Right now I am working
on (in fact have for some time) to greatly improve the
usability of Entry ID's, in particular:
- Keeping the location of ID's in a hash, for fast access
- Writing this hash to disk when exiting Emacs
- Keeping track of locations during cut and paste
- Tools to check for consistency, to make sure no ID has been
duplicated.
- Tools to re-create the hash from scratch, by scanning agenda files and
other files known/suspected to contain IDs.
- Allowing to create a link *to* a remember item: If you
create a remember entry, put a link to it into the kill ring
or maybe into the org-store-link. With ID's you can even do
this in advance, before storing the note, because the ID is a unique
identifier that will find the note wherever you will finally store
it.
One these are in place, collecting the text from a number
of entries listed by ID, or using sparse-tree techniques
to expose a number of entries identified by a list of ID's
will be easy.
I expect the improved OD code to be in 6.15, a which point
we can return to your proposals.
- Carsten
On Nov 27, 2008, at 3:44 AM, Samuel Wales wrote:
This took months to write, but only to be specific in the
spirit of the how you can help discussion. The idea and
feature request are relatively simple.
To skip the preamble, search for [[here is a solution]].
A =conversation manager= is focused on phone conversations,
transcripts, letters, journal entries, etc. A
=conversation= is one interaction or note.
The idea is to keep a global record of conversations of a
certain kind (e.g. phone calls to insurance companies or
doctors) while also keeping that information easily
accessible in the various org places where it belongs.
Some history:
Before I started using org, I kept a record of all medical
conversations in a file. This provided a time-sorted place
to look for conversations. I'll call this a =journal=,
after Carsten's usage in the manual.
I also had a todo file for data (e.g. phone numbers, people
to talk to about x), unfinished tasks (e.g. get insurance
company 1 to see reason, see doctor 1), etc. This was an
indented plain text file in emacs. I will call the org
equivalent =todo.org=.
I copied back and forth.
I want to do better than that with org, because org-mode is
powerful.
Here are some problems with using todo.org to keep
conversations and notes together:
1. The journal doesn't have all conversations; some are
in todo.org unless I only use one consistently.
2. todo.org grows and extraneous information is in there.
3. The notes are scattered over todo.org. For example, I
might have a call to a doctor, and put that note under
the todo item to call that doctor. But that is bad
when I want all medical phone calls in order.
4. I want conversations accessible from more than one
place. For example, if the conversation is under
doctor 1, I also want it under the medical issue and
possibly elsewhere, without duplication.
5. The journal doesn't have its entries in order, because
I might add something else later that happened
earlier, if I copy to journal from todo.
6. The todo.org notes are out of time order (i.e. the
first conversation in the buffer is not necessarily
the first conversation).
7. Except for metadata, conversations should be out of
sight until they need to be looked up.
Of the many solutions that come to mind, here are a few that
I believe will *not* work:
1. Using ordinary links is not a solution, because you
would have to click on each link to see only one
conversation. Also, you couldn't isearch all
conversations at the same time.
2. Advising org-log-note to copy the note to the journal
duplicates stuff. That means that grep will find
things in 2 places. Also, it doesn't handle the
question of notes that should be attached to more than
one item. Duplication is a disaster, IMO.
3. Keeping the notes scattered in todo.org precludes
access to the journal outside org (e.g. if your
computer crashes and you need to get the journal from
your backups on a computer that does not run emacs),
doesn't handle notes that should be attached to more
than one item, keeps unnecessary stuff there, and
increases the size of the org file.
Here is a solution that I believe will work:
- here is a solution. If you are on the doctor 1
headline in todo.org, you run a command that shows all
conversations with that doctor in a single buffer.
The conversations are stored only in the journal. A
single place for all medical conversations that is still
accessible from todo.org.
Here is a design using drawers. See below for a
different design using org-id's that I think will be
better. This one is to illustrate the concept.
