Task warrior, the cli organizer

In one of my article i made a roundup of 3 tools to organize your time: Getting things Gnome, Tasque and Basket note pads.

These are 3 good programs that can help you in task management, and i was surprised when in the comments someone told he’s using a tool from the command line to accomplish this: Task warrior.

And so i tested it.


Taskwarrior is an ambitious project to supercharge task with an interactive interface, GTD features, color themes, data synch, dependencies, custom reports, charts, and Lua plugins.

Installation

In ubuntu 10.10 there is a package ready, so just write:

aptitude install task

There are packages also for Fedora and Debian, for more info check Task warrior donwload page

Tutorial

Another great thing that i’ve found on task warrior are their tutorial, on the web site. There is 30-second Tutorial and a real tutorial that show all the functions of this program.

In this article i’ll try to give you an overview of what the program look like and what you can do with it.

Task

The base element of the whole program is a task, to add one in the terminal just type task add . For instance if you want to write an article. It’ll be like:

$ task add Write an Article
Created task 1

To see the list of tasks you can use the command task list or task ls, and all the tasks will be showed:

ID Project Pri Due Active Age    Description
 1                        7 mins Write an Article
 2                        4 mins Update Wordpress plugins
 3                        3 mins Read Email

Delete a task, in case you accidentally entered a task you can delete it with the command task delete < numero del task >

Add an expiry date of the task, to set dates by which a task must be completed using tasks due: For example:

task due:1/1/2011 2

And to see all the characteristics of the task use task long

task long          
 
ID Project Pri Added      Started Due      Recur Countdown Age     Tags Description
 2             12/10/2010         1/1/2011          -3 wks 17 mins      Update Wordpress plugins
 1             12/10/2010                                  20 mins      Write an Article
 3             12/10/2010                                  16 mins      Read Email
 
3 tasks

It’s also possible to give priority to a task, the 3 priority are Low Medium and High and to set them use task priority:< level of the priority > < task id >

Example:

$ task priority:H 3
Modified 1 task
$ task long        
 
ID Project Pri Added      Started Due      Recur Countdown Age     Tags Description
 2             12/10/2010         1/1/2011          -2 wks 25 mins      Update Wordpress plugins
 3         H   12/10/2010                                  24 mins      Read Email
 1             12/10/2010                                  28 mins      Write an Article

Depending on the priority tasks are shown with different colors.

Project
A project is nothing but a set of tasks, to group them just use task project:< name of the project>

For example

$ task 1-2 project:WebSite
Modified 2 tasks
 
$ task long
ID Project Pri Added      Started Due      Recur Countdown Age     Tags Description
 2 WebSite     12/10/2010         1/1/2011          -2 wks 32 mins      Update Wordpress plugins
 3         H   12/10/2010                                  31 mins      Read Email
 1 WebSite L   12/10/2010                                  35 mins      Write an Article

These are the base of task warriors, other things you can do are

• Tag task with one or more words
• Modify a Task
• Add little notes to a Task
• Set Task recurrence
• Set dependencies between tasks
• Export tasks as Vcalendar o csv
• Show a calendar with your tasks

I like and use Getting thing Gnome, but i must say that this little program it’s a real gem for the hardcore lover of the CLI, i really suggest it for all the one that use the terminal a lot.

And at last a video tutorial, there are not many special effects but it is very clear:

And this is teh second video of the tutorial where you can find the fancy things (as Paul wrote)

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