Show HN: Todool, a full blown environment for managing large trees of task lists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Todool, a full blown environment for managing large trees of task lists

todool.handmade.network

71 pointsmonkeyguy3722 comments

Currently an alpha is available in their Discord server.

I'm not the creator, if you have any questions about the program feel free to join the Discord server.

To my eyes seems to be the nth modern notebook UI application, witch is NOT a critics but a consideration: on classic systems, from old Smalltalk to actual Emacs the "notebook" or "document" UI was and are the norm.

Then the critic part: ALL such modern "document-centric UI" have one and ONLY ONE purpose, witch means they can't be integrated with anything else. For instance I can't link an email and an open ticket in a task in Todool, simply because that document UI lack the knowledge for such action while in Emacs/org-mode I perfectly can link an Email, a ticket, a feed post, an HN post etc NOT because someone have implemented that specific feature in an app but because there is no app but a unique ecosystem extended by "apps", no separation, no special IPCs needed.

Long story short: while potentially modern apps can do more graphically than classic ones, simply because those are almost stuck at 40/50 years ago development, they all fail because all are single application running on bare-bone crappy systems designed to be like a container ship for commercial purpose, instead of a unique ecosystem where any app is just a set of functions.

Please, all devs, think about that. FLOSS CAN restore the ancient model, NO ONE corporate want simply because it's incompatible with their business needs, so "we can win" if instead of investing resources copying BigTech stuff for doing new things we develop old tech FAR MORE ADVANCED than modern one thanks to a user-centric design.

This looks like a great was of managing todos (storing the notes, setting their state, tagging them, changing their state, setting their dependency todos, deciding in which colour each note type/state/tag should appear, moving it in the calendar, toggling the stopwatch/timer/pomodoro, etc) instead of actually just doing the things on the list.

“Dool” / دول means “penis” in Farsi.

This got me wondering if anyone’s built a service to catch these kinds of things and it turns out they have! Wordsafety.com catches this successfully

And "to" means "you"

This is basically an outliner[0]. Looking around the page i didn't see any graphics, only text. At the past i wrote a text-only outliner[1] which while very useful, i eventually found the need to embed images, change text styles, etc and the only way to do it would be to basically rewrite 90% of it (so i never bothered) as it was written explicitly for console/text mode. Since you are using graphical output, i'd recommend to check what sort of non-text functionality you can add (checkmarks, progressbars -which IMO are inferior to percentages anyway-, etc aren't really taking advantage of graphics, i refer to things like images or even videos, text styling, etc).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/

I use codemirror texteditor and haml so I can write stuff directly on the website. I have #hashtags to connect single sheets with each other but basicially its an outliner. Works pretty good for my needs.

https://i.imgur.com/C1wImlG.png

You either do the TODOs or live in it long enough to become one with the TODOs.

I would like to treat the tools as tools (a means) and not a destination (your actual work). This applies to Calendar, Email clients, TODO apps.

Looks like Taskpaper or FoldingText

https://www.taskpaper.com https://www.foldingtext.com

I wanted to try but those are both Mac specific.

Could not find a github/gitlab link so nack.

> Currently an alpha is available in their Discord server. I'm not the creator, if you have any questions about the program feel free to join the Discord server.

This feels sketchy. I've never seen software distributed this way. Why not just provide a download link if the effort has already been made for the website with videos.

I've seen it a bunch of times, mainly from people closer to gaming/gamedev (considering the site is from handmade.network, even if not official, it is very tangentially related to Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero series).

I think it is the modern version of "to download the latest version visit our forum at XYZ" in an attempt to build some sort of community around a project.

Recent macOS outliner alternative: Bike https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31409077 I've played around with it and found it pleasant to use

For someone who needs to add visuals and deals with more messy content in general, Bear.app is still the best native Mac/iOS solution.

Oh, dear. Managing deep trees of TODOs is... not a good way of managing TODOs.

I find long TODO lists/trees stressful and cumbersome. I used to maintain quite a few of those, but eventually found it discouraging. There's no end in sight!

What I appreciate about GTD and its context lists that look and feel like TODO lists is that they are short. While I may have items sitting on mine for several weeks at a time, overall, they feel entirely manageable, like about a week's worth of work. GTD provides me with other tools to get stuff out of my head and reliably resurface them when needed.

(Edit: style)

What if TODOs were a graph instead of a tree? that way they can update themselves!

There's also hnb: https://hnb.sourceforge.net/

I'm still waiting for a todo tool that does todos how I do them. Each todo item has a TTL of 1 week, after that, it gets moved to the "never done" list if I don't update it before then.

After a few years of doing things this way, and explaining it to my bosses over time, they come to understand that if you give me too many things to do at once, only the highest priority things will ever get done.

That kinda of a symptom of a work culture that can only deal with crisis's and doesn't value steady strategic effort.

I'm fairly confident you could hack org-mode in Emacs to do this with a couple of lines of elisp.

That’s basically how I do it now.

I began to use Trello and its automations for these kind of things.

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