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Taskwarrior – CLI Task Management

by httbs on 8/27/24, 8:17 PM with 70 comments

  • by t_mahmood on 8/27/24, 9:00 PM

    Self plug, I'm developing a minimal gui for Taskwarrior, focused on keyboard navigation.

    https://github.com/tmahmood/taskwarrior-web/

    Task warrior is the my core of task management, as I've ADHD,I lost track of my task if it's not easily visible, this ui helps me with that. It shows timer for active task on the top.

    Future plan is to integrate time warrior too.

  • by simonw on 8/27/24, 9:10 PM

    In case anyone else is interested in seeing the schema I ran a few example commands through this and the dumped my ~/.task/taskchampion.sqlite3 database out to SQL: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ab208b18b6c3ab31ea3feb70f6502...

    It's mainly JSON data stored in some simple tables, with full historic change tracking modeled as JSON too.

    Here's that example loaded into Datasette Lite: https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.github.com/simon...

  • by dcchambers on 8/27/24, 11:59 PM

    I LOVE taskwarrior but I feel any TODO software that can't easily be synced across devices is a nonstarter these days.

    Sure I could throw the sqlite db in Dropbox or something, but there's no good way to manage the TODOs on a phone.

    Every 6-12 months I'll give it another try and love it but feel it's just too limiting for most personal tasks.

    I do like to use it for work tasks that aren't tracked in Jira...so stuff I generally only care about when I'm at a computer.

  • by PhilipRoman on 8/28/24, 7:27 AM

    Don't get me wrong, this is probably great software, but there is a big field of tasks like reminder apps, calendar, note taking apps etc. for which I just use a plain free form text editor. I don't quite see what these tools offer, other than pretty user interfaces. And after taking the time to learn the new tools, there will still be cases when I won't have access to them, while plain text works everywhere

  • by natemcintosh on 8/28/24, 12:52 AM

    Been using taskwarrior (and the really great TUI interface https://github.com/kdheepak/taskwarrior-tui) for about 6 months now. My favorite things:

    - really fast day-to-day navigation using vim-like controls in the TUI

    - automatic sorting using due date, task dependencies (A must be done for B to start), age, etc.

    - task dependencies. This is really helpful for me

    - decent enough cross-device sync with syncthing (I already had it up and running)

    - ability to produce reports. E.g. what tasks did I complete for project X last month?

    - whole system has a good set of hooks into it, making it relatively hackable

    Downsides: - was slightly intimidating at first. If you're starting out, definitely start on the simple end, and slowly add complexity to your setup (creating tasks -> due dates -> using projects -> creating task dependencies -> using contexts for work/play/study -> ... -> ...)

  • by vstollen on 8/28/24, 12:18 PM

    I've used Taskwarrior (and Timewarrior [1]) for some time and one thing they uniquely do is automatically rank your tasks by a number of factors.

    For your tasks, you can set priorities, a deadline, dependencies, and more. Using this information, Taskwarrior computes an urgency score so you can see your most urgent task using:

      task next
    Sometimes I wonder what a GUI-based app would look like that does such urgency rankings.

    [1]: https://timewarrior.net/

  • by f1ay on 8/27/24, 10:24 PM

    Love taskwarrior. Looking forward There's a great TUI; https://github.com/kdheepak/taskwarrior-tui

    I wish cross-device-sync was feasible, but it's pretty good.

  • by Shank on 8/28/24, 4:17 AM

    I love taskwarrior so much on desktop, but hate it so much on mobile that I ended up switching to 2Do. It’s so heartbreaking because the automatic task prioritization you get is really novel and nice. But the iOS client situation is dire, and as much as I found it novel to have working sync and mobile with iSH, it just didn’t cut it for me.

    It’s definitely my favorite task manager I can’t really use for this reason.

  • by lelanthran on 8/28/24, 12:17 AM

    I think, at this point, there are probably more task management tools that aren't Jira than there are users who don't want to use Jira.

    I myself have a few; here's my entry into this particular category (c/line and written in bash): https://github.com/lelanthran/terminal-todo

  • by adius on 8/28/24, 1:15 AM

    I wasn't happy with Taskwarrior, so I started to develop my own CLI task manager called "TaskLite" a few years ago. Here is the comparison page:

    https://tasklite.org/differences_taskwarrior

    I'm about to release a new version with a lot of improvements the coming weeks.

  • by bsmith89 on 8/27/24, 8:43 PM

  • by andrewjf on 8/27/24, 10:17 PM

    I absolutely love Taskwarrior. I love that it'll just tell you what to do next based on weight, priority, due date, size, etc. I love annotating and adding tags/labels etc and how generic things are.

    It's really a pain in the ass that I can't get it on multiple devices so I ultimately never am in the right place to add todo items. I know there's a Task champion sync-server that's rewritten as part of Taskwarrior 3.0 but it seems very early in the development and I haven't gotten to to work and have been using Inkdrop instead; would love to go back to Taskwarrior.

  • by Esras on 8/28/24, 1:14 AM

    Bad form to recommend something else...

    But I had some of the same issues that people have described about synchronizing across multiple devices with notifications and all that jazz, and ended up landing on Amazing Marvin (https://amazingmarvin.com/).

    It is the single, closest thing I've found to the same paradigm of Task Warrior's prioritization systems, and incredibly customizable, which is lovely to see as a web app. No connection to it, other than it being something I love.

  • by lawn on 8/28/24, 4:08 AM

    I love the CLI part of taskwarrior but the Android UX sucks compared to other todo managers such as todoist, so that's what I'm running now.

  • by jhspt on 8/28/24, 6:25 AM

    Another shameless plug: git-task

    Task manager or bug tracker that resides right within git repository and can sync with GitHub.

    It's on a very early stage of development, but somehow works. I'd really appreciate any ideas on what can be done/improved (actually, a lot).

    https://github.com/jhspetersson/git-task

  • by jxy on 8/28/24, 2:15 PM

    How does taskwarrior deal with recurring tasks now? Like tasks that have a due date recur every two weeks, or tasks that have a due date always two weeks after done.

  • by codazoda on 8/28/24, 12:08 AM

    This looks pretty nice. I would need to dig in a bit to see if it supports showing only my next most important task and an alternate method of ordering to work for me. Based on the docs I did read, I bet it has this built in. I’m also curious about size.

    I recently wrote a little about how I used Bash to hack together my own list.

    https://www.makervoyage.com/todo

  • by aidenn0 on 8/28/24, 5:24 AM

    This is for todo lists; for text-based calendar management, let me recommend remind[1]; if you prefer a TUI, wyrd[2] has you covered.

    1: https://salsa.debian.org/dskoll/remind

    2: https://gitlab.com/wyrd-calendar/wyrd

  • by sigoden on 8/28/24, 12:58 AM

    Taskwarrior officially provides bash/zsh/fish completion scripts.

    If you're a PowerShell or nushell user and need autocompletion for Taskwarrior, try https://github.com/sigoden/argc-completions.

    Argc-completions provides multi-shell completions for over 1000 commands, including Taskwarrior.

  • by 3np on 8/28/24, 3:24 AM

    In case you want some form of time-tracking, there is also Timewarrior from the same devs. Works stand-alone and integrates well with Taskwarrior.

    https://timewarrior.net/docs/what/

  • by niemandhier on 8/28/24, 11:01 AM

    Is there a way to sync this to my phone?

    Integrations are what I am looking for in a tool like this.

    Orgmode etc. work well while I am glued to my computer, but once I take the hands of my keyboard I need a deep cellphone integration.

    Unfortunately I could not finde a sensible solution to sync between Linux and iOS so far.

  • by dariubs on 8/28/24, 6:12 AM

    Productivity blog shares a blog post on it

    https://blog.productivity.directory/taskwarrior-the-command-...

  • by yobibyte on 8/28/24, 9:51 AM

    Shameless self promotion: rtd - task manager written in Rust, everything is stored in text files: https://github.com/yobibyte/rtd

  • by danielvaughn on 8/27/24, 10:03 PM

    This looks great. I've been considering building a TUI that offers a simplified Jira/Trello/Linear experience - should've known someone else was working on it.

  • by Multicomp on 8/27/24, 10:44 PM

    This is cool! I would use it if it had CalDAV sync (or the subset that lets you do lists, tags, recurrence, notes) so I could sync it with Tasks.org on android.

  • by The28thDuck on 8/28/24, 12:33 AM

    Nice! I’m not seeing an implementation for actually completing the long list of things I have to do though. Perhaps that can be added in a future update? :-)

  • by thelastparadise on 8/27/24, 10:22 PM

    This is infuriating. I keep clicking on the thumbnail images and it's not expanding to full size.