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Show HN: I Made a Todo List for Developer Power Users [video]

by skytrias on 2/9/23, 2:01 PM with 43 comments

• by bbor on 2/9/23, 4:26 PM

  I love this app!! The UI is super fast and the demo is well made. I think either way you’ll find users, tho it is a crowded space - the most important part is whether you personally find it useful I think :)

  I think you’d get a lot of the features people are complaining about missing, namely around mobile usage, by having this just be a GUI for editing markdown files. Markdown is amazing, it can definitely store all these states, and can be edited with a plain ol text editor if you don’t have time to write a phone app.

  For an example of how powerful “a gui that stores its content as specialize markdown” can be, see obsdidian.

• by Sirikon on 2/9/23, 5:45 PM

  This heavily reminds me of TreeSheets https://strlen.com/treesheets/

• by joemasilotti on 2/9/23, 6:49 PM

  This is an amazing demo! It's rare to see a live demo this polished. And one that uses the app itself to actually do the demo? Even better. Nice work! I'm excited to see where this goes.

• by dpcx on 2/9/23, 4:13 PM

  A lot of what I saw in the demo video looks like workflowy.com with a slightly different UI on it. It feels a little faster than workflowy, so that's definitely a bonus.

• by lopan on 2/10/23, 3:47 AM

  After buying it and using it for a few hours on Windows: Things I don't like - As you might expect for a version 0.5, there are pretty frequent crashes, which appear to happen mostly when expanding/contracting or hiding/unhiding a root node. Save often.

  Things I do like - No installation required. No subscription. It's a bit like Workflowy and a bit like Treesheets (as mentioned previously), but I find it easier to read than either. It's fast.

  As someone who suspects that they might have partial ADHD, I love that there are several ways you can put a "spotlight" on what you are working on (depending on the theme) - 1) Selecting more than one line causes other lines to be greyed out; 2) "Highlight" changes the background colour of the current line; and 3) "Focus" causes everything except the immediate branch to be hidden! So good!

  Looking forward to the future and more stability. :-)

• by enobrev on 2/9/23, 5:09 PM

  This is excellent. Well done! I love the demo.

  I've been wanting to work on something similar, with "scriptable tagging" plugins, so that I could, for instance, enter text like [ABC-123], and have it auto-link to a jira or linear ticket. Ideally it would show the state and possibly allow drilling-down into the contents for those tickets as well (expand ticket shows description, status, expand further to show comments, etc)

  Likewise with slack links, github links, etc. Ideally those links could potentially also allow interactions with said services (marking done in-app, marks "complete" in ticket app)

  I think I'd also want items in which I could write full text entries - but still referenced in the same list-style format, expanding the text as needed.

  Anyway - those are the features I personally want in _something_ like this, in a markdown editor, something I end up writing poorly and leave to die on some drive somewhere - wherever.

• by polytely on 2/9/23, 3:58 PM

  Feels to me like the default completion green in the demo video is too low contrast on the white background. I would check if the contrast ratio is high enough (it's important for accessibility).

• by crdavidson on 2/9/23, 8:18 PM

  Ooh, I've seen this before on the Odin newsletter! https://odin-lang.org/news/newsletter-2022-11/

  Exciting to see this get some spotlight. Was it entirely from scratch? Did you build it on SDL or Sokol or something?

• by eigenvalue on 2/9/23, 5:30 PM

  Looks interesting but really does not handle super high DPI screens well in Windows-- the interface text is extremely tiny and hard to read. You should probably detect the resolution and adjust the default UI text and task text to always be a comfortable size for easy reading.

• by didgetmaster on 2/9/23, 4:12 PM

  Is this a completely 'off-line' tool or do does it need some kind of connection to a central server? Does it send any of your data over the network or does all your information remain local (i.e. private)?

• by inferense on 2/9/23, 6:26 PM

  This is great! I'm building a developer-first knowledge base with tasks [1] and getting such experience with tasks is quite difficult. Something we're cracking just now. Great job.

• by geoelectric on 2/9/23, 6:42 PM

  Well, I guess after years of all the good Todo apps being Mac/iOS, this serves us right! It sounds way interesting, though. I'll have to boot a VM to try this out.

• by narag on 2/9/23, 5:51 PM

  Nice job. This looks very much like something I've been doing for some time... years :-)

  The thing with this is it's exhilarating to use once it's working. Congrats!

• by sublinear on 2/9/23, 7:39 PM

  I thought power users just write nested bullets in a plain text file? It also happens to be valid markdown when you do that.

• by itake on 2/9/23, 4:02 PM

  Seems like some neat ideas here. but I am a bit confused who the customer is for this.

  I am a software engineer that heavily uses todo tracking apps, but this isn't for me.

  I use todoist to manage my life. Critical features are mobile app and scheduling tasks.

  I use jira to manage project work. Critical feature is multi-user.

  This is desktop only, so I can't use it for my grocery list.

  This doesn't seem to let me share tasks with other people to track my progress and delegate work.

  I guess if I am a solo dev and I wanted a private system to track my tasks that isn't JIRA, then this is useful?

• by JoeyBananas on 2/10/23, 8:09 PM

  Did you just reinvent org mode?

• by rickstanley on 2/9/23, 7:29 PM

  Would you mind telling what is the underlying rendering engine/framework?

• by ActionHank on 2/9/23, 5:13 PM

  I did not know itch was also used to sell and distribute software

• by beepbooptheory on 2/9/23, 8:39 PM

  Looks like it can do about 60% of what Org-mode can do, which is pretty good for apps like these!

• by ricardobeat on 2/9/23, 4:02 PM

  This reminds me of https://checkvist.com, which I hope would be used more. It's actually a great replacement for Trello or any other kind of board for smaller projects.

• by Dyac on 2/9/23, 7:10 PM

  Seems similar to https://workflowy.com/, which has been around for 12 years and has the same features + more and is prettier.

• by eps on 2/9/23, 7:59 PM

  There gotta be a rule that Show HN videos must be non-monetized or hosted off YouTube.