Advance notifications for Deadlines/Scheduled Tasks/Events: Syntax and Functionality

[vale981]

The PR #615 (+ orgzly-revived/org-java#12) implements a facility to notifications to be triggered for events some set periods of time in advance.

The question now is how to specify these periods (i.e. as property or tags or something else altogether). The goal of this discussion is to find something that we're all happy with and that ideally works with existing emacs solutions. (Especially, the APPT_WARNTIME has some overlap with this feature and should be supported.

The way it currently works is that the user adds a property (called notify by default) which contains the time intervals for the advance notifications. The content of this property is a whitespace separated list of elements that can be integers (interpreted as minutes) or quoted strings will be parsed by [kotlin.time.Duration.parse]. This format is compatible with https://github.com/akhramov/org-wild-notifier.el but a little bit more flexible (which is what I wanted).

An example is 10 "2h" "1 day" corresponding to three pre-notifications 10 minutes, two hours and one day in advance, respectively.

[Adeor]

Using a property like you outlined instead of "magic" tags (as discussed in the linked PR) does in my opinion seems like a much cleaner solution.

I think the ISO-8601based duration format used by kotlin.time.Duration.parse is great for this and it also seems to be a superset of durations in org-mode and a natural extension of them.

Also note, that org-wild-notifier is deprecated and the repo is archived since 2025-08-02 with the author recommending org-alert, which uses remindern as property. Still, as long as it's configurable, notify seems entirely appropriate.

Concerning the double quotation marks around the last two elements: Are they "org-mode quotations" for ensuring that they aren't parsed as seperate list items or relevant to the duration parsing behold that? (I'm mostly wondering, since afaik 2h doesn't have to me wrapped in "org-mode quotations" to be a valid single list item)

And it would imo also be nice to support :notify+: syntax for defining multiple notifications.

[vale981]

good idea with :notify+: