Suggestion for improvement, org-read-date: prefer-closest-date instead of only prefer-future*

Suggestion for improvement, org-read-date: prefer-closest-date instead of only prefer-future*

[Anders Johansson]

Hi.

I sometimes use timestamps for scheduling, sometimes for logging things 
(manually and a few days later). It would be pretty convenient if one 
could define a preferred range of time for incomplete dates, instead of 
just prefer-future or default to current month or year.

Example:
It's 2013-12-25 and I want to schedule something for 2014-01-05 and add 
a "log timestamp" for something last week, 2013-12-20.

It would be convenient if entering "01-05" and "12-20" would do the 
right thing regardless of the setting of org-read-date-prefer-future.

This could be to prefer the closest date, but even more configurability 
would be added if a sliding range of dates along a year were preferred. 
For example, 9 months into the future and 3 in the past so that entering 
"9-26" would give 2013-09-26 and entering "9-24"
would give 2014-09-24.

I think something like this is reasonable as it might be more common to 
enter a date a few months back than one almost a year into the future.

I don't know if this applies as much to the case of only entering a day 
number though, maybe there entering "-x" covers the case of wanting to 
enter a date a few days back and preferring the future otherwise.


Perhaps this would add to much complexity to org-read-date, with little 
gain, and there may certainly be complications I haven't thought of, but 
I think it would be an interesting option for many people.

Cheers,
Anders Johansson