ntbre / org-alert

System notifications of org agenda items

org-alert

Provides notifications for scheduled or deadlined agenda entries. This is a forked version from the original by spegoraro that checks how far away the events are before notifying.

Command overview

org-alert-check

Check for and display agenda entries that are active and due.

org-alert parses your org agenda for the current day looking for any headlines that are scheduled or contain a deadline that aren't marked with any of your DONE state keywords.

org-alert-enable

Enable periodic deadline checking.

Sets a timer which periodically calls org-alert-check. The interval can be set by changing the org-alert-interval (defaults to 300s).

org-alert-disable

Disable periodic deadline checking.

Cancels any timers set up with the org-alert-enable function.

Installation

Manually

The original version linked above is the one in Melpa, so if you want to use this version you have to install manually.

The original instructions are "Clone the repo somewhere you will remember and then add it to your load path:"

(add-to-list 'load-path "path/to/org-alert")
(require 'org-alert)

But I just put

  (load "path/to/org-alert")

in my config. Probably the original instructions are better.

Configuration

org-alert uses the excellent alert package from John Wiegley to present its alerts. This defaults to using the emacs message function for displaying notifications, to change it to something prettier set the alert-default-style variable to one of the options listed here.

To get system notifications like the screenshot use the following:

(setq alert-default-style 'libnotify)

You can even define your own styles!

Some other configuration options I like:

(setq org-alert-interval       60 ; how often to check for tasks, in seconds
	  org-alert-notify-cutoff  10 ; how long before an event to notify, in minutes
	  alert-persist-idle-time   0 ; make notifications persist
	  alert-fade-time         600 ; don't fade alerts for 10 minutes)

Custom titles

org-alert uses the title Org Agenda by default. You can set this to something else by changing the org-alert-notification-title variable. Use this if you'd like to customise the display of org notifications when using a daemon such as dunst.

Custom regexp for searching agenda entries

org-alert searches for agenda entries with 'Sched' or 'Deadline' word by default. You can set any other regexp you wish using the org-alert-headline-regexp variable.