Numeric Priorities (Was: Re: org priority cycling - removing priorities)

[Nuutti Kotivuori <naked@iki.fi>]

Carsten Dominik wrote:
> But as I said, this may not be good enough a reason.  Open for
> discussion.

I find the priority settings almost unusable for me.

For personal things, I just use them simply with the default settings
to mark tasks that really should be done ASAP ([#A]) - and tasks which
really aren't so important at all ([#C]). This is fine enough.

But for my work tasks, priorities are really important as they are
given to me externally. So I need a lot of priority levels, both up
and down from the default. And atleast I'm not so savvy with alphabet,
that I could instantly see how much less important [#P] is than [#T] -
especially with respect to the default level etc.

So, how about adding a new feature, org-todo-use-numeric-priorities.

This would make the priorities be like:

  * TODO [#+2] Task 1
  * TODO [#+1] Task 2
  * TODO Task 3
  * TODO [#-1] Task 4
  * TODO [#-2] Task 5

And there wouldn't need to be any "highest" or "lowest" values for the
priorities. Also, I couldn't ever figure out why there needs to be a
way to specify the default priority explicitly (eg. [#B] vs. lines
that have none) - so I'd just vote for dropping that - no priority
listed if the priority is zero.

This way I could always set some task on a higher priority if
necessary, or a lower one - and I'd only have problems if I need to
have something in between priorities (if we don't go for float values
;)), but that should be easily solvable by a bit of preplanning or
just editing a few task priorities.

How about it?

-- Naked