Plain text todo manager

Plain text is simple, easily created, easy to understand, and infinitely portable. It’s also dead simple to write tools for and cut and slice anywhichway you need.

1. Every Todo item starts with a special character ([], *, -, +, or #)
2. A ‘completed’ Todo can be deleted or marked with a starting x.
3. You can add tags :tag1, :tag2 to any Todo.
4. Use the special tag :later to mark Todo’s to be done later.
5. Todo’s can be indented to make for easier entry/reading. Indented Todo’s inherit the tags of it’s ‘parent’ Todo.
6. Lines that don’t start with any todo markers are considered supporting notes or rough scribbles. Notes are associated with the previous todo item.

* Write a todo list
* Buy Eggs :shopping :joes
* Butter :shopping
* Cheese :shopping
* Release Toodle-O :toodle-o
x* Write Readme :toodle-o
* Implement :toodle-o
	* Write Parser
	* Write Command-Line Interface
* :supermarket
	* Pencils
	* Chicken
* :toodle-o
Write toodle-o's command line in python because it's pretty ideal for little utilites like this.
At some point port it to the web?
	* web-version :later:

The toodle-o command-line script, by default, will work with a todo.txt file in your HOME directory. It will also look for a toodle-o.conf file in your HOME directory which can contain a list of todo files scattered across various directories.

toodle-o.conf:

[files]
./Desktop/todo.txt
./my/projects/toodle-o/todo.txt
...

toodle-o is good at understanding a variety of todo formats and importing them for use.

You can bypass the default $HOME/todo.txt and files in toodle-o.conf by providing files yourself on the command line using multiple -f flags:

$> tt -f mytodo.txt -f ../project/todo.txt ...

If you would like to simply add a file temporarily to the defaults use the +f flag instead:

$> tt +f mytodo.txt

Let’s link our toodle-o command-line script to the short form tt for easy typing in the examples below. To add a new Todo, start with a +:

$> tt + add a new todo :project
$> tt + :shopping bread

If we provide a tag it will show us the list for those particular tags (without completed (x) and :later items).

$> tt -ss :shopping
Buy Eggs
Butter
Cheese
Bread
$> tt -ss :toodle-o
Release Toodle-O
Implement Toodle-O
	Write Parser
	Write Command-Line Interface

The nested elements are indented using tabs so they can be easily piped for further processing if you only want the top level etc.

We can see more details (including later and done entries along with the file name) with the verbose tag:

$> tt -v :shopping :supermarket
TODO	(shopping,joes)	Buy Eggs
TODO	(shopping)	Butter
TODO	(shopping)	Cheese
TODO	(supermarket)	Pencils
TODO	(supermarket)	Chicken
TODO	(shopping)	Bread
TODO	(shopping)	Bacon
TODO	(supermarket)	Rice

/my/shopping/list.txt
/my/todo/list.txt

$> tt -v :toodle-o
TODO	(toodle-o)	Release Toodle-O
DONE	(toodle-o)	Write Readme
TODO	(toodle-o)	Implement Toodle-O
TODO	(toodle-o)		Write Parser
TODO	(toodle-o)		Write Command-Line Interface
NOTE	(toodle-o)	Write toodle-o's command line in python because it's pretty ideal for little utilites like this.
NOTE	(toodle-o)	At some point port it to the web?
LATR	(toodle-o)	Web Version

/my/projects/toodle-o/todo.txt

To see everything:

$> tt -v

And to find items that do not have any tags:

$> tt -ss :
Write a todo list

You can also just search for any matching word:

$> tt -ss eggs
Buy Eggs

You can search for items not matching a tag or word using ^:

$> tt -ss :shopping ^:supermarket ^eggs
Butter
Cheese
Bread
Bacon

To get the list of tags:

$> tt -t
:shopping
:supermarket
:toodle-o

To mark matching items as completed:

$> tt -x :shopping eggs
x Buy Eggs

To manually edit all matching files:

$> tt -e :shopping eggs
# opens using the $EDITOR or vim by default

Enjoy