Show HN: TaskPaper 3 – Plain text to-do lists for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TaskPaper 3 – Plain text to-do lists for Mac

taskpaper.com

As a programmer, I use Taskpaper 2 all the time. Taskpaper 3 is good news! The interface could be more intuitive, I feel (red dots for folding? can't drag an outline to the bottom of the file?) and I would personally love tabs to keep multiple lists open and organized at the same time. But other than that, I feel the future for Taskpaper is bright.

The dots are also drag handles. Originally I made them disclosure rects, I just think the dots look a little cleaner and since they can be used for both collapsing and dragging I think generic was a little more appropriate too.

Can you explain more on "can't drag an outline to the bottom of the file?". I think that should be possible.

I took tabs out because I felt there was lots of overlap in function between tabs and the sidebar. You can no add saved searches to the sidebar, and that was I think what most people used tabs for.

Don't tabs preserve cursor position and collapse/expand state in a long (potentially multi-screen) document in a way that saved searches cannot?

They do. But hoisting projects in the sidebar does much the same thing. It's not that tabs wouldn't add anything, but they would also add more UI and potential confusion.

Tabs were always a little odd in TaskPaper because 99% of tab interfaces use tabs for different documents/website. TaskPaper tabs on the other hand referred to slices of a single document and people were sometimes confuse that they were not separate files.

Anyway, that's why they are not there now. I can't promise I won't change my mind and add them back at some point. But right now I'm pretty happy with the decision.

Hi, I'm the programmer...

TaskPaper 3 combines a plain text editor front end with a outline backend model. There’s a download on the website. I hope you’ll take a look and tell me how you like it.

Implementation Notes:

- Rich scripting support.

- Internals implemented in JavaScript.

- UI layer implemented with native Cocoa views.

- Outline model is mapped to text buffer that user edits.

User Interface Notes:

- Feels like a normal text buffer.

- No restrictions of how and where you can move items.

- But provides outliner power (folds, filtering, focusing).

- When move folded items around the folds move along too.

- Moving items is unrestricted. You can move an item under a folded item with out that item expanding.

App, website, marketing… let me know how you think I could make it better.

Thanks, Jesse

Reply on news.ycombinator.com