Per-site rules

What a rule can set

Settings → Organising → Per-site rules. A rule is a domain plus any of:

• How far out the reminder opens — an offset, or a fixed hour of the day
• Whether it repeats, and how
• The early warning
• The priority
• A tag and a folder
• Which notification sound plays

A rule only speaks about the fields you fill in. Anything left blank falls through to your global defaults rather than being overwritten with nothing.

Subdomains

A rule for github.com also matches gist.github.com. Rules cover their subdomains, always.

The alternative would be asking you to enumerate every subdomain a site might use, which is asking you to discover the omission the first time a rule fails to apply — usually weeks later, on the reminder you most wanted it on.

New reminders only

A rule applies when you create a reminder. Opening Edit on an existing one shows exactly what that reminder holds, never what a rule would have made it.

Otherwise a rule written today would silently rewrite reminders you saved last week the moment you opened one to change its title — and a settings screen quietly editing your saved data is the kind of thing that makes a tool untrustworthy.

What wins

Strongest first:

1. What you typed on the reminder itself
2. A template you applied
3. A per-site rule matching the page
4. Your global defaults
5. Latr's built-in defaults

One subtlety worth knowing, because it surprises people: the two ways of saying when — an offset ("in three hours") and a fixed hour ("at 9am") — resolve together as one field. Whichever layer wins supplies both, so a site rule that sets an offset is not quietly overridden by a global default that sets an hour.

Rules worth writing

The test for a good rule is whether you have ever set the same three fields twice for the same site. A few that come up often:

• A ticketing site → high priority, an early warning fifteen minutes before. You want to be at the keyboard, not merely informed.
• Your issue tracker → a work tag and the work folder, so nothing you save from it needs sorting later.
• A long-read site → open at the weekend rather than in an hour. This is the rule that stops "read later" meaning "read never".
• A status page you check on a rhythm → a weekly repeat, applied automatically.