Alert frequency

[jakecoble]

I’m experimenting with how alert frequency should be handled. I think I’m approaching something that fits what I want personally, but I’m interested in what others will find useful.

Currently, alerts are displayed at an interval, regardless of proximity to the deadline. It may be more useful to have alerts that start appearing at a specified time before the deadline and increase in severity as the deadline approaches.

I’m experimenting with a configuration variable like this:

(defvar org-alert-interval 300
  "Interval in seconds to recheck and display deadlines.")
(defvar org-alert-severity '(:low 60 :medium 30 :high 5))

As written, the alerts should start appearing 60 minutes before the deadline at low severity, increase to medium severity at 30 minutes, then become high severity at 5 minutes.

Is this something that would be useful to other users?

[spegoraro]

I think it would be a worthwhile improvement.

The current periodic checking and display was really just a quick way to get something running and didn't take into account the repetition it brings.

It would still need to check at an interval to detect new headlines and such but will need to keep track of which timers it has already set up so as to not duplicate them. As for the actual timers, a simple run-at-time would suffice.

[jakecoble]

after-change-functions might let us check for new headlines when an agenda file is edited. I don't yet know if it's possible to only effect agenda files (since we probably don't want to run org-alert-check after every edit), so I'll be looking into how it works.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Change-Hooks.html

[igorcafe]

I would suggest being able to alert in custom intervals, like:

;; 1h, 30m, 15m, 5m, 4m, 3m, 2m, 1m
(3600 1800 900 300 240 180 120 60)

[ntBre]

Thanks for the reminder. I agree, I've left this open for so long because I think it's a good feature to have. I was planning to do the (:low 60 :medium 30 :high 5) approach in the initial issue, but I think there's no reason to restrict it to a single time per priority. We could possibly even combine that with your solution into something like this:

((3600 . low) (1800 . medium) (900 . high) (300 . high) ...)

[igorcafe]

@ntBre maybe I am asking for something totally different, but what I really really wish is org-alert to have a separation of, lets say,

;; the interval org-alert will check if for scheduled events
;; this doesn't mean it should notify every 60 seconds!
(setq org-alert-interval 60) 

;; (may need a better name)
;; notify me for any task 60 min before its scheduled, 30 min before, 15 min before
;; every `org-alert-interval` it checks if now is any of the `org-alert-notify-intervals-before` the task
(setq org-alert-notify-intervals-before '(60 30 15)) 

;; notify me for any task 5 minutes after its scheduled
(setq org-alert-notify-intervals-after '(5)) 

for compatibility reasons, org-alert-interval could behave the default way, unless org-alert-notify-intervals-before or org-alert-notify-intervals-after is set.

what are your thoughts?

[igorcafe]

or maybe change the cutoff variables to support a list of numbers instead of introducing a new variable...
probably simpler