The Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI) | Hacker News Reader

The Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI)

ginatrapani.github.com

61 pointsmlLK18 comments

Raise your hand if you've written you own version of this at least once.

This looks quite slick (though it's sort of ironic that a non-GUI, text-based tool does not have a simple text-based description; I skipped most of the video).

I wrote my own CLI note taker (aliased to '@'), have a Ruby app that interacts with Todoist.com via the CLI; have CLI tools for setting reminders to ping me via Twitter; am starting on one to manage issues on GitHub repos via the CLI.

They're all fairly simple and designed around the principle of WFJ: Works for James. And I've always believed that I'm not alone in hacking out little helper tools like this.

A 3 minute screencast for a simple commandline tool? What's wrong with an annotated transcript?

I'm not really a fan of screencasts but in this case I thought it gave a nice idea of what the tool feels like to use. That's pretty important with something like that, but a little hard to convey through just a transcript.

Enh. I'll stick with org-mode. I always have a text editor up, anyway.

This does seem aimed more at heavy shell-users. I've heard of people finding little at-hand shell windows useful, but my workflow is all about the editor.

(Incidentally, I'd just recently started learning emacs and hadn't heard of org-mode before your comment. Thanks - seems useful so far.)

This is pretty cool. I've been using a textfile for todo lists for a while, but the video tutorial really blew me away.

EDIT: This is really the type of stuff I'd love to see more on news.ycombinator.com -- tools to make me more efficient.

http://ntbk.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/textmode-based-personal...

I've taken a shine to TaskWarrior, http://taskwarrior.org/projects/show/taskwarrior/

Here's a 30-second intro: http://taskwarrior.org/wiki/taskwarrior/30-second_Tutorial

And a more comprehensive display of abilities: http://taskwarrior.org/wiki/taskwarrior/Simple

And combined with GeekTool, I've got a list on my desktop at all times. http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/

seems that most of the functionality here can be replicated with basic shell commands: t add "blah" == echo "blah" >> Todo.txt t ls @search == grep @search Todo.txt

so all this does is ... color-code task priorities - meh

That's what shell scripts do in general, they automate things you could have done yourself with a bit more typing. With a todo list I feel it is absolutely vital that there is as little friction as possible. You don't want the process of recording and tracking what you have to do to distract you from actually doing it!

Plus how long would it take you to accidentally type "echo blah > todo.txt" instead of "echo blah >> todo.txt". I'm thinking a few days for me :)

This is all academic of course, everyone should be using org-mode for todo lists. What do you mean you don't have Emacs running all the time?? ;)

Agree with the generalization. But from the screencast, there is no indication this does anything other than alias basic shell commands. I'd recommend the author screencast something that the average shell user won't look at and wonder why even bother. At least the source code reveals something a little more useful.

A lot of interesting stuff can be done with shell commands and scripts.

A relational database system:

http://www.strozzi.it/cgi-bin/CSA/tw7/I/en_US/NoSQL/Home%20P...

A compiler and assembler in shell:

http://lwn.net/2002/0110/a/osimplay.php3

An implementation of MapReduce:

http://github.com/erikfrey/bashreduce/tree/master

A complete BBS:

ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume13/sbbs/

Agreed but this app isn't such an example. Basic one line shell commands don't count as "interesting stuff" in my book.

I've been using todo.sh for a couple years now, and this is a feature, not a bug. Since everything is in line-oriented text files, I can just use standard shell commands (or a text editor!) when it's more convenient. But the script makes it slightly easier and faster to do very common or complex operations.

really? do you alias any shell commands? by your rationale, that's totally useless and 'meh.'

it's simple: if you have any shell aliases, you are a hypocrite if you complain about this being just that.

I use etherpad for my to do lists. I used to use "Things.app" on my mac but I found that had too many features I just didn't use, and I couldn't access it online/elsewhere.

echo "todo note" >> todo.txt vw todo.txt where vw is an alias for less.

I thought this was satire at first.

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