when I’ve been afk, TagTime pops up a red window with pico, and I’m meant to edit my RETRO pings. but to do that I have to scroll down to the bottom of the window each time
is there any way to avoid this? ideally, the pings in the ping file would be ordered reverse chronologically so everything I have to edit is at the top
doesn’t this get very annoying with much larger ping files?
Good question. In vim there’s a command line option (vim + filename) to put the cursor at the end of the file. Looks like pico is similar but needs an explicit line number, so you can do this:
pico +99999999 filename
oh thanks!
oh actually I have a follow up question. whenever I return from being afk I get one pico window. and I save it, and then I get a NEW pico window, typically with additional entries to check. is this working as designed?
Sounds like it’s working as designed.
The first one is the regular what-are-you-doing-right-now question, but it has no idea that it’s been sitting there for hours waiting for you to answer it.
Once you do answer that one, TagTime can realise that there are other unanswered pings, and pops up the second window.
I’m not sure that’s the case. the first window is a pico window with new afk entries in it. the regular TagTime “what are you doing right now” window doesn’t use pico
Interesting; mine uses vim the whole time. Nonetheless, my answer stands.
The first one contains the pings that occurred up to the point that the window popped up.
The second one contains the pings that occurred between the first window popping up and being closed. Meaning of course that sometimes it doesn’t pop up at all.
This might be redundant with @philip’s explanation but I started typing it before I saw his so, in case it’s helpful, here’s what happens when the editor appears twice:
UPDATE: Sorry, I had overthought that. It actually does the smart thing. If you dismiss the prompt it pops up an editor for all pings you didn’t answer, starting with the one you dismissed.
The only way I get the editor appearing twice is if there were more pings that happened while I had the editor open, which is exactly what you’d expect.
Basically, when a ping happens, the prompt appears. If the prompt can’t appear because there’s already an unanswered prompt open, or a previous incarnation of the editor, then an editor opens instead so you can catch up.
And you can always force the editor to pop up by dismissing a prompt without answering it, by hitting enter.
I fear I’m making it sound overcomplicated now. I actually think it’s always doing the obvious intuitive thing so, @nslater, I think something must be wrong with your setup.
thanks @dreev but this doesn’t match my experience
here’s what happens
the first window contains whatever entires I had tagged already plus one “afk off RETRO” line. the second window is full of “afk RETRO” entries"
It sounds like the normal ping prompts aren’t working for you. Technically you can still make it all work with just the editor popping up but that sounds pretty inconvenient. Maybe the best way to start debugging it is to see if you can make the ping prompt window appear via the command line, checking in the code for how it’s invoked.
hmm? the ping prompts work just fine! 
what I described is just what happens when I return to my computer after a long period of time
I’m very confused now. When the ping prompt pops up it should just sit there until you answer it, even if it’s hours or days. So how do you see the editor when you come back from being afk?
when I’m at my computer I get the regular ping promp which I can just type and hit enter and it goes away. but when I go afk and return I do not see a ping prompt, I see the pico editing window. I have no idea how or why this is happening? I figured that was by design
Not by design! But now I’m super curious; this sounds like ghosts or gremlins… Like what happens if you see the prompt appear and just take your hands off the keyboard and walk away? Does the prompt stay there indefinitely or does it somehow kill itself? If so, I wonder how. Nothing in the code makes that happen intentionally.
Or is it that prompts that try to appear when your computer is idle fail for some reason?
maybe? when I go afk I usually shut the lid. perhaps that causes it?
what would you like me to do to help you diagnose?
Ah, shutting the lid explains it. Sorry for my confusion! It’s actually super simple how it works: if the computer is on then it pops up the ping prompt which waits indefinitely. Any time TagTime comes back to life – turning the computer back on, submitting tags from the prompt or from the editor, or just dismissing the prompt – it checks to see if there are any pings to catch up on. Like from more than 30 seconds ago. If so it opens the editor.
So that’s it. The editor simply pops up whenever there are old pings to catch up on.
BUT the editor opens twice when I open my laptop! is that by design?
I see this double-window too. @dreev’s explanation still holds, with the addition of a user-invisible virtual lid-opening. Let me try to articulate that sequence (badly, I suspect).
I think what happens is that at some point my laptop wakes up and does some background processing while it’s closed. The windows that we see on opening the laptop depend on the ping pattern before and after that waking.
If TagTime sees historical unanswered pings during that moment of closed-wakefulness then an editor pops up, which of course I don’t see until I actually open the laptop. When I dismiss that editor, TagTime sometimes determines that there were more unanswered pings between the first window pop-up time and now, so pops up another editor with more missing pings.
I don’t know whether TagTime could easily know that there’s no-one at the helm when that first editor window was displayed. Once it’s up, there’s nothing in the background checking to see whether the window contents are stale. Of those two options, knowing whether there’s a user present is likely the easier fix.
So that’s kind of as designed, and kind of unintended, all at the same time.
I think this is the heart of it. Expect the editor to pop up again when you close it if pings happened while the first was open.
There should never be 2 editors open at once though. Something is misconfigured if that’s happening.
yeah I never see two at once. it’s always one, then another one