The Kitchin Research Group

I have been playing with yasnippets. A pretty cool feature is that you can run elisp code in the template to generate text. Below, I define a snippet that will create a todo item due 7 days from the time you define it. This is an unconventional way to define a snippet, but I did not want to save it to a file just to try it out. So, I put it in a temporary buffer, and load it from there. When you run this block, it will note it is a new snippet, and ask if you want to save it. You can say no.

We will use the code we developed here to create a timestamp from the current time plus seven days.

(yas-global-mode)
(with-temp-buffer
  (insert "# name : todo-followup
# --

*************** TODO $1
${2:             DEADLINE: `(let ((seven-days (seconds-to-time (* 7 24 60 60))))
  (format-time-string \"<%Y-%m-%d %a>\" (time-add (current-time) seven-days)))`}$0
*************** END 
")
  (yas-load-snippet-buffer-and-close 'org-mode))

Now, you will have a new entry in the YASnippet menu that is called todo-followup. If you put the cursor on a blank line, and select that entry you get this below (after you fill in the text for the headline, of course!):

*************** TODO see how many times this was viewed
		DEADLINE: <2014-02-23 Sun>
*************** END

That is pretty nice, as it saves a lot of keystrokes for that particular kind of task. Let us up the ante, and see if we can make it interactive so you can enter the number of days from now the task is due.

(yas-global-mode)
(with-temp-buffer
  (insert "# name : todo-followup
# --

*************** TODO $1
${2:             DEADLINE: `(let ((ndays (seconds-to-time (* (string-to-int (read-from-minibuffer \"Days until due: \")) 24 60 60))))
  (format-time-string \"<%Y-%m-%d %a>\" (time-add (current-time) ndays)))`}$0
*************** END 
")
  (yas-load-snippet-buffer-and-close 'org-mode))

*************** TODO sweet!
		DEADLINE: <2014-02-26 Wed>
*************** END

Well, that made it just a bit sweeter! I was prompted for the "Days until due:", entered 10 days, and a date 10 days from now was automatically entered!

Copyright (C) 2014 by John Kitchin. See the License for information about copying.

org-mode source

Org-mode version = 8.2.5h