Command Line Task Management With Taskwarrior and Taskell On Arch Linux / Thinkpad x220

Key Takeaways

hey guys so this is gonna be about task management I mentioned I was going to talk about my task management terminal applications there's mainly two that I use the giant complicated beast that is task warrior and and n curses based like Trello board Kanban board called task L which uses Haskell if you couldn't infer that so I'm gonna cover both of these one of them is strictly command line one of them and the other is in curses like I said so task Warrior is completely terminal-based so I actually have some shell scripts I wrote let me get to I wrote a couple of these because I don't want to type out tasks and then all the other arguments for their built-in binaries and their scripts so I wrote a couple add tasks oh so this is action old one when I was doing my initial move of my task management from Trello to tattoo task warrior or if I just had a large batch of tasks to add I can just input them all into like a shell script and using the right shell script commands input all the details for all the tasks on one batch and I could have as many as I wanted in here and just have all of that in there now I didn't actually write shell scripts for the rest of my commands I think I just alias things so let me see them dog bash RC yes so I wrote a couple functions in shell and then I have a couple commands here that deal with task management so if I want to add a task I just do tat ta tasks ad for me and then it allows me to have an input which is the name of the task report runs my favorite report it's just like a burned a daily burned down of your tasks and I'll show you that in a second tea is task list because if you just type tasks it just shows you a list of tasks like this as well as all the annotations sub notes I don't like seeing all the annotation notes and there's a lot of things with tasks warrior-like it is a behemoth of a program not in size but in complexity and how much you can do with it I mean if you use it for a simple use case it's pretty okay but it can it can get complicated so it's great for you know small things it's great for really large things and there's multiple layers of the hierarchy of how you can manage tasks you know there's contexts projects tags subtags all kinds of stuff anyways so task list is how I like to see mine task list which is this view and the annotations are in the brackets right here so it's more concise and its line line line line line it just looks nicer and cleaner to me so I just do tea now does that because I don't like typing but and then I actually have an H here which is for task goal which I just because T is already taken task lists tasks oh I just task goals written in Haskell so I just say hh4 Haskell whatever I wrote a couple of functions so like tasks project I want to assign a task to a specific project like if it's you know do something around the house or something to do at work or it's some project like that I don't really like dealing with the contexts too much because it's kind of wonky to switch between them and I like having everything in one place even though I can filter it so I kind of just do my highest level of differentiation of tasks categorization is at the project level not the context level that's just me you can do whatever you feel like doing but you would input you know the tasks the number of the tasks modify it and then the project is going to be whatever project you want so if I was going to do tasks project then I would type this which is the alias so the tasks project function is alias to t / so I would type I show us to do a live example so the project of tasks 6 here which I don't really care do I see these is I need to move my backyard so task 6 let's just do T pro 6 because the first argument is going to take is a task number which is 6 and so it's going to modify and at the project is going to be in the second argument which is YouTube dr. Judah so it modified the task so now let's test 6 YouTube is now the project now a task can only have one project at a time so this is how like I do my differentiation you can filter with commands as well there's a lot of commands and a lot of flexibility you can have a task for you but for instance like this I just changed my project very simply to so T pro 6 to do yeah so there we go back to normal so that's like T bro I got TT which is task tag because you can add multiple tags to tasks like the tag I have you know one of my research projects I want to do is learn more law tech so the tag is la tech now if I want to say that task 6 needs to have a category tag or a tag like I don't know chore so let's just say ok task tag 6 gets a sure because task tag function takes a task number modifies it and adds a tag so this is aliasing and referencing the function to TT so tt6 chores the tag to be added enter says test 6 right here as the tag chore now yay so now I want to remove that tag so let's just say task 6 modify and I'm gonna do - chore so now it's gone so that's basically you know that's the type of simplicity and intuitive nature of the program and I dig that I have a couple other references in here but you don't need to worry about those yeah so those are like some of my basic aliases and for task warrior now test warrior is as I said and keep saying big intense complex you can do a lot let's just see so my default task is task list that's how I like to see them line items like this annotations are grouped in these brackets now an annotation is just like a comment on something like I think Milotic ones so task edit 5 annotation annotation yes so like I have notes on here that you can see like you can have multiple annotations and you have all this stuff in here for the task which is tasks warrior stores all the data in Jason so that way you can easily grab your information it's not locked down in a proprietary format its Jason we all know how to deal with Jason with JavaScript or whatever so like it's in Jason it's easy to deal with but you can edit your tasks manually that way if you're just really confused on something you're not want in a you don't have to research the command you just need to get it done like you just quickly edit the task and save it but I also downloaded an additional package called tasks open which works with tasks warrior tasks worker has a lot of extensions and packages that works with it and increases and expands its functionality the only one I've really used so far are really cared about is tasks open because it allows you to have URLs or like a markdown document of notes attached to your tasks now I think it is actually stores the documents in the task itself like in the Jason string maybe but what I tend to do is I have a file somewhere in my computer like if I go to my home I have right here I have music discovery and yeah music discovery so what I have in my task is go through music discovery list because I have a list of artists I want to like actually go through and listen to all their music and see if there's more of it that I like that I currently have and you know I have the mark down list but what if I want to doing all of my management of my tasks in task warrior so this is where I'm at right now I want everything here that I'm gonna be doing to do so in this case tasks open takes an argument to task open and it's gonna be the number of the task which is four for music discovery 4 and it will actually open the document that is actually on in my home directory so with this I can see all these links to like the websites where I'm gonna go or whatever to research more but this opened up from task warrior I don't know what these commands are or what's going on here so I need to look into that but I mentioned earlier that I have a report so task warrior has a lot of reports available for you to visualize your task management so if I write report this is what I have alias and remove my face this is what I have aliased for you know daily burn down so I can see you like daily these are the how how many tasks I have completed how many are pending I don't have any started because I actually just finished the ones I had started but this is like you know the daily burn down and that's actually how I like to see my tasks broken out for reporting so our task warrior also has like the assignment of urgency or priority there's a lot of fields here that I've actually removed but you can add a lot of fields and I even have a document in here for my own sanity called the task warrior cheat sheet I don't remember where I got this but maybe it was tasks where you're working I guess I got it from them all the types of stuff you can do with tasks warrior is a lot of stuff so with this there are contexts which can be like entire project or realm so if you want to have like a context for work and a context for home that way when you're at work you can be in your work context and only see and deal with work items and then when you get home you can switch to a home context and then only things related to home appear and in each of those contexts you can have priorities you can have individual projects each project can have any number of tags and you can actually have the description of the task and you can have an annotation or just notes on the task or you can have tasks open installed like me and actually have documents and URLs and whatever working with this now if you have a URL as an annotation and you use tasks open it'll actually open the URL on the browser and then urgency this is like a randomly not randomly but I mean it's calculated based on tasks warrior and if it has a project and if it has tags and based on the priority and if it's a started or whatever like this will actually it does it for you I don't do any of this and also I should tell you the urgency of a task you can sort you can filter you can even make tasks wait so I actually have tasks I forget what it is huh I have a bunch of tat maybe oh I think I actually deleted them I have a bunch of tasks that you can actually make tasks wait so that way they don't even appear when I call it tasks it won't even show them because they're currently on hold their postpone for a later date so that's actually that's buying the box so like you can actually make like postpone tasks there's just it's just so much task edit six so like they have IDs you IDs statuses here's the project if I wanted to edit it manually description created started and the schedule do you can set due dates recurrences wait until last modified date like I don't need to change that one but you can have task dependencies annotation notes dependencies all this stuff and there's documentation in here as well you can make this as simple or complex as you want now I tend to prefer and really like Kanban board task management so like this I used this for a while but I just really it was a little bit difficult for me to get more out of it and it was a little bit too much terminal like too many commands to have to memorize to do all the little things that I wanted to just get it done so I I still use this I still like it I still use it but I'm really using more of tasks oh now now with tasks oh I changed a couple defaults but with tasks oh I actually have what the heck did I open oh okay so with tasks oh I actually wrote a shell script for tasks oh because um I think maybe I was the configs I edited I don't remember oh yeah I think it was the configs yes so when you type tasks oh when you first install it it'll open up a file a markdown file named tasks oh that's the default I want to mine do just be called to do because reasons you can change some of the default settings in here I never really had a reason to you can change some of the default colors I've done a little bit of that I think that one is themed yeah I changed mine too oh I didn't I'd really tried trick to change it to some of the Grove box colors but it wasn't looking right so I kind of just left it as it is and it works just fine but it's some any files it works it works it's not a lot to like edit like it's an in curses based program it's a Kanban board and curses based program the files for configuration key bindings configurations and the theme colors like this is the configurations are so easy like I'm still learning a ton about this entire system but these think these configuration files were a dream like so simple to understand very easy wow that's all there is to it it's very laid out super simple great love it okay so I changed my default file from task old MD markdown to to do because I have my to-do markdown document in here now if I'd go vim and I open it in vim and you can see it's just a markdown document this is all written by task oh I didn't write any of this so if I go to task phone number I Elias this in my bash RC H is TAS Cole it will open up tasks oh the end curses interface I also changed which how many swimlanes I have because I currently I like this layout this is the layout I use for all of my Kanban type stuff I have multiple Kanban things in different places but ice box backlog to do in progress waiting and completed I got lists of files and let's just make an example task you can see like I have my YouTube videos this is one of them I have a task here I'm just going to have any one so a opens up an inner end or new task hello YouTube enter oh the task exists and I'm ready to type another one because it's just stays in insert mode if I hit escape it leaves insert mode and it's hovers over the task you can see it now it's purple I can go hjkl vim keybindings right and left I can go to hello YouTube and I can hit enter and it enters the task now if I hit enter again you can see it has no description but if I hit enter now it sorry I mean you type the the description and I hit escape hey we're out of insert mode but I want to enter subtasks on this task if I hit a like we did outside ah so you can see now it has 0 out of 1 so now we have a task okay I want to enter another one enter oh just like it was on the outside of the task all right I'm done entering tasks so escape leave that insert mode I can go J&K to go up and down h&L don't do anything here but if I want to complete a task all I have to do is hit spacebar and you can see that this toggles the number out here as well all right what if we want to have a due date on a task like I have over here if I am just selected on top of the the tasks over here just hovering over it I can do the at symbol shift too and this will say ah due date now this accepts the due date has to be in year month day separated by dashes so it would be like 2019 - 12 - six is tomorrow and enter now we have a due date its turns red it's red out here great what if I want to delete this task actually let's do movement first if I hold shift if I just do hjkl it'll just take me around in here and I can select stuff but if I want to move this task I can hold shift and move it over here over here up up left all over the place now and I let go it's yeah I can move around like normal again but what if I want to delete it shift D deletes the task ah if I want to undo that I can do you there we go now I have a lot of completed tasks you know just this is just perfect for me it has everything I need it has due dates it's got subtasks it's Kanban swimlane oriented it I love tasks oh it's not Trello it's not too much it's not browser-based it's minimal it's end curses it's terminal I like it so this is what I use mostly nowadays is tasks --all and I do still keep some stuff in task warrior but for the from out of stuff that I need tasks well just does it for me got some YouTube videos coming down the line this is these two I'm just combining into one I got some other stuff coming down so look forward to that anyways I have this I've gone on long enough these two programs are amazing if take the time to learn them it just it's I love doing my task management on the on the terminal like this Trello is great I'd really like to Trello but going to task well it's just there's no more noise no more graphics it's just the text the necessary parts it's all I need I love it alright that's all for now have fun