Re: missing appointments

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Rodrigo Amestica <ramestica@lavabit.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I use appt to connect desktop notifications to appointments in my
> agenda. However, the connection between the appointments and the
> notification system does not happen until I visit the agenda with, for
> example, "C-c a a", which I sometimes forget to invoke and I end up
> missing appointments.
> 
> Trying to automate I created a short cut like this:
> 
> emacs -f org-agenda-list my-main-org-file
> 
> However, this seems to execute org-agenda-list before my-main-org-file
> has fully opened in its own buffer and I end up with the window split into
> two buffers: top one scratch and bottom one my-main-org-file, which is
> visually very annoying. It is completely mysterious to me the timing
> at which different actions take place within emacs and how to control
> and sequence them, like a 'wait' call. 
> 
> Is there a way to automatically execute org-agenda-list after
> my-main-org-file has fully finished opening in its buffer?
> 

I think this is the wrong way to go about it.

> Is it there some more streamlined way to connect agenda to
> notifications such that I would not need to explicitly enable them
> every time I open the file?
> 

The way to do it is to call org-agenda-to-appt. The trick is to
call this function at all the necessary places/times. I have the following
code in my initialization file, after the rest of org initialization:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
...
(org-agenda-to-appt)

(defadvice  org-agenda-redo (after org-agenda-redo-add-appts)
  "Pressing `r' on the agenda will also add appointments."
  (progn 
    (setq appt-time-msg-list nil)
    (org-agenda-to-appt)))
(ad-activate 'org-agenda-redo)

(add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook
	  (function org-agenda-to-appt)
)

;; wrong
(setq org-appt-timer (run-at-time "00:01" nil (function org-agenda-to-appt)))
...
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

There are four pieces here:

o an explicit call - this gets executed at initialization and loads
  up the appt-time-msg-list from the agenda.

o advising org-agenda-redo so that after it's done, it resets
  appt-time-msg-list and calls org-agenda-to-appt again. That
  way, if something goes wrong, I can pop up the agenda, press "r"
  and start afresh.

o add a call to org-capture-after-finalize-hook - that way
  when I  capture an appointment for today, it will be added
  automatically.

o finally, I would like to add a call at midnight every day to
  recalculate appointments for the next day - unfortunately, the call
  above is not correct, so for now I do it manually with an
  org-agenda-redo as above.  One of these days I'll get that fixed. If
  anybody has done that already, I'll gladly steal your code :-)

I *think* that should catch everything. BTW, there is an org-hacks
entry by Russell Adams:

  http://orgmode.org/worg/org-hacks.html#org-agenda-appt-zenity

where he suggests also adding it to org-agenda-finalize-hook: that way
it gets done every time you display the agenda as well. Not sure whether
it's necessary or overkill for me, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.

Nick