Tody Task Manager
Failing to find any free software task manager I could live with, I created my own over the December holidays. I called it “Tody”. It’s a simple GUI app, focused on quick searching, editing, and tagging for tasklists. The file format it uses is identical to the plain text format used by Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt command-line tool and Android app, it even loads preferences from the Todo.txt config file. Since the file format is plain text, tasklists can be shared between machines (or users) over Ubuntu One or Dropbox.
I created it using Rick Spencer’s Quickly templates (GTK, Glade, and Python). I went for a streamlined workflow for the way I use tasklists, so I’m curious if it will map well to others. It appears as a simple text file, with a search box at the top of the window. Clicking on a tag performs a search for the tag (these are similar to Twitter tags, any word that starts with “@” or “+”). The list sorts tasks by priority (marked with “A”, “B”, “C”, etc) and then alphabetically. When the list is limited to search results, the search terms are highlighted in the tasks.
Clicking on the text of a task brings up an editor window, with a checkbox for “Done” tasks, a field to edit the task, and clickable palettes for task priorities and all the tags you’ve used previously in your tasklist. It’s streamlined with shortcuts, so typing Space, Enter marks a task as done, saves it, and closes the editor window.
I’ve started using Tody as my primary task manager, after dumping all my old tasks from other task managers into one text file. I’d like to tweak the search feature, right now it does a completely literal string search, but I’ll change it to split up search terms (so it’s not sensitive to order of terms). Then the next step is to link it up with my Todo Lens, so the edit window for Tody pops up as the action for clicking on a task in the Lens.
The Tody app is up on my PPA, let me know if you try it out and have any requests for features that fit your workflow:
https://launchpad.net/~allison/+archive/ppa
This entry was written by allison, posted on 2011/12/31 at 6:50 pm, filed under experiment, floss, linux, ubuntu. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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6 Comments
I’ve been wanting to make exactly this app for over a year, this is fantastic!
Thanks.
You should link up with Bryce Harrington, he has a similar application (but more GTD focused) that you might want to swap ideas with.
This looks nice!
Ah cool, I’ll catch up with Bryce.
Can you give a pointer to what we’re supposed to do to use/install it? I don’t know what these PPAs are.
PPAs serve the same purpose as branches in source control, a safe location for testing changes or new features that acts like it’s part of the main distro. Are you on Ubuntu? If so, scroll down to “(Read about installing.)” on the PPA page and follow those instructions. Otherwise, I’ll make a regular tarball.