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Comment by ben174 | Hacker News Reader

Back in my Microsoft development days, I fondly remember Visual Studio automatically adding todo comments to a dedicated little docked window in the corner of the IDE. It was very efficient and would always be in the corner of my eye and I would always circle back to them as a result.

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I still use this feature, it comes under the "Task List" window. Adds any "TODO" comments in realtime by default but it's also possible to extend what tokens show up alongside "TODO" [0]. I've added "Hack" or "Perf" for temporary implementations that definitely can be improved but not necessarily critical.

[0] https://keyboardp.com/post/40190774577/using-task-list-token...

Intellij Idea has this feature as well. Also it checks for new TODO comments when you commit and warns you about them, so you won't forget to fix if you wanted.

It was a while ago since I used Eclipse, but I think it greps all the TODOs in the source code or project workspace, and list them as a list of TODOs :-) for you to work through.

Not sure if it still does this but I found it to be a really good feature.

Eclipse still has this and even better you can define your own tags that are also added to the list view. You can then filter by tag name in the list view.

I found this handy when doing large refactorings (e.g. that took multiple weeks or months). I could define a custom TODO for that refactoring for labeling tasks that I knew I would need to resolve before completing the refactor but was not able to tackle immediately. It made it less stressful knowing I would be easily able to find the tasks again and the central list made it efficient to clear them all.

I have something similar in Emacs with magit-todos, although it's very slow on large codebases.

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