Managing tasks with Remember The Milk and Emacs

2011-05-22 — mosu

These days I’ve got a lot of stuff to do. There are basics like cleaning the flat or fertilizing plants. There are things connected to my hobbies: remembering to fix a bug or implement a feature in my programs, answering forum posts and emails, practice my choir pieces. And then there’s everything going on at my job: do this for a customer, implement that in a program, and that other internal thing has to be remembered as well.

Too bad I’m forgetting more of those things than I’d like to admit. Fortunately someone invented TODO lists for people like myself.

I’m using the excellent Remember The Milk service (short: RTM) for this kind of thing. The one thing I find absolutely fascinating about RTM is its fast, single keystroke based web interface. Being an avid Emacs user as well I always wanted to be able to access RTM directly from Emacs in nearly the same way. Web searches only turned up an integration into Org mode, which I don’t use and don’t want to learn, I decided to write this myself: SimpleRTM – An Interactive Emacs mode for Remember The Milk. The code is over on github, and installation is trivial.

Have fun.