Re: Ringing the alarm bell in orgmode

[Stefan Kamphausen <skampi@gmx.net>]

Hi Uwe,

"Uwe Jochum" <uwe.jochum@uni-konstanz.de> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> using entries in my diary file I get an alarm bell ten minutes before a
> meeting or an appointment. That's useful. 

and should be more flexible...

> But indeed orgmode is much more flexible 

:-)

> for dealing with appointments and scheduled items, so I
> wanted to do more time management in orgmode. But I cannot figure out
> how to set an alarm bell in Emacs for scheduled stuff in orgmode. I
> tried to do it by integrating my orgmode file in the diary file (see
> orgmode FAQ, sec. 9), but that doesn't work (and it is not recommended
> by Carsten). So is there any other way to get the notification mechanism
> to co-operate with orgmode?

And what is more: you need to rely on Emacs running.  OK, since I read
EMails with Gnus Emacs /is/ always running, but nevertheless.  I
prefer my alarm bell being an informative reminder email.

Shouldn't it be possible to have a small elisp file which checks for
alarms to trigger in `org-agenda-files' and performs some reminder
action (like sending an email, ring the bell, start some external
application to create a popup ... whatever) if needed?  This small
extra elisp file could then be called from cron using emacs --script
command line option (only available in Gnu Emacs 22 if I am not
mistaken but something similar could probably achieved using -l, -batch
or -f, etc) every -say- 5 minutes.

To find out whether an alarm has to be triggered there could be a
global option which then refers to the scheduled date-times but one
might also think about a syntax how to defined multiple reminders for
one todo item.

Being but a beginner with org this may be a stupid idea, but it
/sounds/ reasonable to me.  I haven't started writing some elisp,
though.  And of course this is slightly OT :-)


Best Regards
Stefan


-- 
Stefan Kamphausen --- http://www.skamphausen.de
a blessed +42 regexp of confusion (weapon in hand)
You hit. The format string crumbles and turns to dust.