Taskwarrior: command line task manager

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Coretech

Web design & Free Software

Free Software tools & technologies for web design & front-end development.

I am a sucker for text editors and in a similar vein, I am a sucker for task managers. I can't help myself from trying them out.

My current setup is using the web-based Remember The Milk sort-of combined with a Getting Things Done methodology. (Oh, and since you ask, I really like Sublime, Vim, Notepad++ and Geany ;)

I did look at using Vim with Vim Outliner for implementing GTD but I find Vim a bit of a headful, although I am persevering.

Wunderlist looks kind of interesting but I'll need a lot to persuade me to move wholesale from Remember The Milk.

Taskwarrior Solarized theme by Paul Beckingham
Taskwarrior Solarized theme by Stefan Keel

And then today I saw Taskwarrior "a command-line todo list manager". Wow, that appeals to my inner geek. It is available as a binary for most flavours of Linux, there's a graphical front-end, it's easy to use but with lots of extra oomph. And you can set it up to use Getting Things Done (amongst other methodologies).

The only downside is that there doesn't appear to be an Android client available yet, although it does have push/pull/merge functionality (see man task-sync).

Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Talkback

That is a very interesting and a neat app. Those text-based apps are still nice especially if you need to check something through an ssh session for example. Midnight Commander (a text based file manager) is still one that I find highly useful. It is mind boggling at the amount of open source software available for GNU/Linux. You imagine something and voila, somebody else has already thought of it and created something. It's a lot of fun to dig through the software repositories of GNU/Linux distributions to see what is available. Thanks for the post!

apexwm 20 January, 2012 19:43
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This post has been removed by a moderator.

@apexwm: what I think is interesting is that there is a GUI built for Taskwarrior, and also a web-based version too:
https://github.com/theunraveler/taskwarrior-web#readme

This is built with Sinatra, a ruby framework.

What is interesting about this is the possibility of other apps (web and otherwise) being built on top of the core software - other examples include Grsync for rsync, and PDFChain for pdftoolkit.

Jake Rayson 23 January, 2012 16:53
Reply

I use org-mode. It has massive functionality, but I only use about 1% of it (I use the collapsing outline to add further info and notes to my todo list)

duncanjmurray 23 January, 2012 22:09
Reply

@duncanjmurray: thanks for heads up about org-mode, nice looking emacs task manager http://orgmode.org/

Jake Rayson 28 January, 2012 10:57
Reply

Found out that Taskwarrior stores all data in plain text files:
"Task writes all pending tasks to the file ~/.task/pending.data and all completed and deleted tasks to ~/.task/completed.data. They are text files, so they can just be copied to another location for safekeeping. Don't forget there is also the ~/.taskrc file that contains your task configuration data."

This means you could use some sort of automatic Git daemon to sync your files? eg https://github.com/crackleware/git-auto-sync#readme or dropbox?

Jake Rayson 3 February, 2012 12:38
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