prompts

Prompts: reminders you can postpone

I want to perform some action on a regular basic (weekly, daily, every ninety days), but be able to veto the action if I was otherwise engaged, which would cause it to be suggested again the next day.

I had a solution in windows, using Powerpro's scripting language.

Many of the actions I was executing were simply to look at particular urls. For most of them, I

forgot the idea of vetoing, and just arranged to visit the page when its time had come:

  1. To visit pages every morning or afternoon, I tagged firefox bookmarks AM or PM (or both), then opened all bookmarks tagged AM or PM accordingly. I use a script using xdotool to select the appropriate subitem from the bookmarks menu.
  2. I found a few useful firefox extensions for urls I want to see less frequently, e.g. browse-periodically and my-weekly-browsing-schedule

What I've come up with is prompts.py, supported by cprompts.py and dialog_utilities.py.

It will run on linux and win32 platforms with python 2.x installed.

It requires the configobj package (python-configobj in linux repositories).

dialog_utilities.py needs one of the following packages for creating dialogs:

gtk, easygui, ctypes, easydialogs, dialog

or, lacking any of those, can make its prompts in a terminal window.

dialog_utilities.py has a class for each framework, and within each class

self.nOrder_win and self.nOrder_linux variables which determine the order in which attempts are made to

initialise (load packages, etc). Change the values of those variable if you want dialog_utilities.py to

try for a gui framework in a different order.

On linux systems, gtk will most likely be used.

python-easygui can be installed on linux systems; it uses the Tkinter toolkit.

On windows, messageboxes are constructed using ctypes or easygui.

Latest version (0.80 beta) of prompts here.

It comes with a sample menu configuration file and usage instructions (as well rules for menu configuration files).

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