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Comment by cldwalker | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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