{"id":849,"date":"2013-11-26T11:27:20","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T10:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=849"},"modified":"2013-11-26T11:36:55","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T10:36:55","slug":"my-new-best-friend-todo-txt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/my-new-best-friend-todo-txt\/","title":{"rendered":"My new best friend: todo.txt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As some of you will be aware, I’m an avid user of to-do lists.<\/p>\n

Long before such lists were commonplace on the net, I used something we techies call “pen and paper” to keep my lists.<\/p>\n

By the late 1990s, I had my first Palm Pilot and still think that the To Do list that came with the device was one of the best thought-out bits of software I’ve ever used.<\/p>\n

Ever since then I’ve tried pretty much all the available options and have to say that I liked Toodledo<\/a> best of all of them, and synced it to my various phones and tablets over the years.<\/p>\n

I recently thought I’d give Wunderlist<\/a> another try as it keeps getting amazing reviews from places like Lifehacker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Wunderlist has one fatal flaw.<\/p>\n

The default display of tasks is not in the order in which you need to do them.\u00a0 In other words, if I have 100 tasks, some of them due today, some due next month, the default should be to show the ones due today first, right?<\/p>\n

But if I look at all tasks, Wunderlist shows me them grouped by category — so I may very well see non-urgent tasks appearing on top of the page, but urgent ones appearing far further down.<\/p>\n

As I use my to-do list as a calendar<\/a>, I need to be able to see rather quickly if I’m free on a certain date.\u00a0 With Wunderlist, that’s pretty much impossible, especially if you have a bunch of categories.\u00a0 (If you keep everything in a single category, it would work.)<\/p>\n

So I decided this week to try, once again, an old favorite — todo.txt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Originally developed by Gina Trapani<\/a>, who founded Lifehacker, todo.txt is basically a stripped-down, open source system for power users of to do lists.<\/p>\n

It’s feature-poor, which is perfect, because you can add the features you want.<\/p>\n

And it’s based a simple text file (todo.txt) with a human-readable, easy-to-understand syntax, which you ideally host on Dropbox.<\/p>\n

Here’s what a typical task would look like in todo.txt:<\/p>\n

Write article about todo.txt<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s right — that’s all you’d need.\u00a0 Make a list of those, and you’ve got a working database for todo.txt.<\/p>\n

But I’m going to improve it by adding a category, in the case, “Writing”.<\/p>\n

Write article about todo.txt +Writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s built-in to the “official” spec for todo.txt.\u00a0 But it’s also very easy to hack.<\/p>\n

For example, the default version that appears on my Android devices doesn’t include a field for the due date (though there is a way to due this using the command line interface).<\/p>\n

This would normally be a deal-breaker.<\/p>\n

But I can insert a date as the first bit of text in the title, and voila, it sorts by date when you sort alphabetically, which I can leave as the default (unlike Wunderlist).<\/p>\n

Here’s how the line would now look:<\/p>\n

2013.11.26 Write article about todo.txt +Writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

And within a single date, I’d like to highlight essential tasks without using the existing priority field, which would look like this:<\/p>\n

(A) 2013.11.26 Write article about todo.txt +Writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is because I don’t want to choose between sorting by priority and sorting by date.<\/p>\n

So instead, I put an asterisk just after the date.\u00a0 That way, the automatic alphabetic sort by title works perfectly.\u00a0 In other words, this would be one line for a top priority task for me, due today:<\/p>\n

2013.11.26 * Write article about todo.txt +Writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

The one thing that would make todo.txt perfect would be if the Android version would include recurring tasks<\/strong> and the due date<\/strong>, but maybe that will happen in the future.<\/p>\n

So, sorry Toodledo — you’re not getting a renewal of my $14.99 “Silver” subscription.<\/p>\n

And Wunderlist — well you can forget about getting those \u20ac45.00 you ask to become a “pro”.<\/p>\n

I’m sticking with Gina’s solution because, while not perfect, it’s flexible and it’s free.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As some of you will be aware, I’m an avid user of to-do lists. Long before such lists were commonplace on the net, I used something we techies call “pen and paper” to keep my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-web-exclusive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}