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.
Impressive, I am definitely giving this a test drive.
One observation: one thing people dislike about task warrior is that it can be complicated using it on the go, e.g. on a smartphone. A web interface like yours offers a real chance to make task warrior usable on smartphones and solving the syncing problem at the same time.
Is this within scope of your ideas? Or is the web interface mainly thought for (unauthenticated) local use?
For now, my scope is local usage. As I am working as a freelancer, having free time to work on personal project becomes a luxury :-(
Yes, remote usage is an issue for task warrior. As I work from home, remote access is not yet a priority to me.
Come to think of it, as the UI can be accessed in LAN, maybe I can use local storage to store the data on mobile, sync with the desktop when it can connect back.
I will keep it in mind, to see if I can do it, I feel it's an interesting idea!
Hey, no worries, been there, done that. It is your personal project — don't ever let anyone (including me) pressure you into doing any work you would not do yourself.
If this was my project and I was tasked with adding mobile support I'd add:
- a simple (optional) authentification scheme that let's you deploy the whole thing server side/log in remotely
- a alternative mobile interface that works well on smartphones without keyboards
Then the task data lives on the server and syncing is a on-issue
As a fellow ADHDr, I've found that I lose track of the entire task tracking system if it doesn't remind me of its existence. I recently wrapped the taskwarrior CLI with some bash and zenity popups that run on crob jobs to ask me what I'm doing and its proven quite effective at getting me to stay on task and log what I've been doing via timewarrior. Not sure how easy that is to do in a web UI, but if you find a similar struggle, it might be worth a shot.
Thank you for posting. I’m of the same mind, so I appreciate you working on this publicly. I’ve bookmarked it to check it out next time I get frustrated haha (I have a “productivity things to try” bookmark folder)
I don't think there's any need for another TUI when we have VIT, I tried to make my UI as par with it in terms of information density, and keyboard access
> The synchronize command, which first appeared in version 2.3.0, allows your Taskwarrior instance to share tasks with other instances. You can have several instances making local changes all of which sync to a single server, and they will all be kept up to date, with changes flowing from instance to instance.
There IS an android implementation on the play store I think. I ended up just running task warrior on a VPS and shelling in though. But that UI sucks on a phone.
I use this one [0] to run Taskwarrior on Android. It's abandonware but still works well enough for me. Enough for adding, removing, moving and ticking off tasks. I have the TaskWarrior server running on a VPS. Only works with the 2.x versions of TaskWarrior though as that is what is integrated in the app. Both the app and PC sync to the server instance with the Taskwarrior native sync functionality.
Would love to see some proper multi-device support in the latest release. The above setup works in itself. But the app is not being maintained anymore and Android as an OS has moved on. For example the launcher shortcuts for task filters stopped working with some Android update. And I guess Taskwarrior itself has moved on as well with v3. I'm not going to use it though as long as there is no multi-device support.
Oh well. So far I have not been bothered enough to have a go at making it work myself. There are probably as many flavours of Taskwarrior clients as there are users :)
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
Same here. I've been using "todo.txt" for years (decade?) now. It's hardly more than a very loosely defined format to present TODOs. Lot's of tools, apps, GUIs and whatnot developed around it.
The format is so easy that anything that can edit txt allows to manage it without hassle, so even if MyFavoriteTool is abandoned in a year, I can continue with my todo system. And synching a text file is a no-brainer too. I now just use dropbox. But used git, rsync and some more in the past.
The only downside I've constantly run against, is that I cannot "share" this with my spouse or colleagues. Guess "team" function could easily be invented, but so far no one has, that I know, and I'm not going to put that task on this todo.txt file either.
I think i read some where (or maybe i heard it on a podcast?) about a user of todo.txt who maintained a separate todo.txt like shared-todos.txt or something which basically was a file which was shared with others to track , well, shared tasks. I think they also incorporated a shared calendar, but can't recall if the calendar and the shared text file were connected manually or automatically (through some bash script). I don't recall any more of the details. But, i guess it is possible, and at least one person does employ this tactic. My assumption there is that any sharing of such a text file would necesitate that all collaborators are text file-centric users too.
This approach is not something that would work for my family...but, maybe i have a friend or 2 (at most!) who could collaborate this way (that is, sharing a text file of ToDos). But, i wonder how annoying it would be to track such a separete file for this? Hmmm. I think at some point the need for multi-person collaboration might break down with only a single text file...and since things likely need to get at least a little more sophisticated, might necesitate more tooling. I guess.
For me it's dependencies and automatic urgency ordering. Greys out whatever I can't do yet without actually hiding it, helps decide what's most important to do next, and automatically adjusts all of it when a task is completed.
I did only use a text file before fiddling with those two features and finding they did actually help me. Nowadays I use taskwarrior for anything that will last longer than a day, and a temporary text file for only the things I plan to do that day.
For me personally, timed reminder is a must have. Being able to give some task a date and then forget about it until its due and gives me proactive reminder. As far as I know, no text-based system is capable of that.
I was going to say something similar. Is it ever the case that a single app or something tiny piece of technology has revolutionised a persons discipline and ability to stay on top of things?
While apps might make things easier, unless the individual develops a personal system and follows it in a disciplined fashion, none of these things are going to make a difference.
Tools are just that, tools. 150 years ago someone might have said the same thing about a pocket watch or a paper calendar.
The question is, whether the form of task keeping the tool encourages fits to your practice. E.g. if you have a well ordered software engineering life, thst thing might be perfect, if you are a mother of three that works as a alpine guide a paper based system might work better. Or you might just not like the choices they made — which is a perfectly fine reason not to use it.
What I have learned is that procrastinators will hunt for the perfect tool to manage their backlog, especially when it means they can avoid tackling their backlog.
One thing tho: time tracking can be an eye opener. Many people do 30 minutes of effective work a day, while (understandably) feeling stressed for not getting shit done. Task Warrior has a great time tracking extension. So depending on your life and needs it might be well worth figuring out where you spend your time.
I am with you, as of now I use a paper notebook for all that.
But in a previous (more predictable) life I was using task warrior and time warrior and was very happy with it. Especially since it also runs on android and you can just sync the data.
If you like Command line applications and need something that is good for many tasks in nested projects and time tracking capabilities (e.g. as happens in software world) it is worth checking out.
- 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 -> ... -> ...)
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.
Deployment was quite complex for the target audience, due to requiring mutual TLS and thereby requiring the management of self signed key infra or a commercial TLS cert.
I've had good success using Syncthing to keep my tasks in sync between my phone, laptop, desktop, etc. Point it at your Taskwarrior data folder and you're off.
I see taskwarrior-tui being mentioned a couple of times in this thread. If anyone is interested in why or why not to use taskwarrior-tui, the biggest advantage of taskwarrior-tui are 3 fold:
1. Previously you would have to type `task report`, `task add …`, `task report` again to see how your priorities have changed. With the TUI you can get live feedback.
2. By default, the TUI comes out of the box with intuitive (in the author’s opinion) single-key press actions that map to various taskwarrior subcommands on single or multiple tasks.
3. The UI lets you as a user run 9 custom bash scripts as shortcuts that can extend features without changing the source code.
There are a few things not so good about it though.
1. Everything is accomplished by shelling out to the taskwarrior `task` cli, which has some nuances in parsing command line arguments, and all the corner cases haven’t been ironed out.
2. The calendar feature, the contexts feature, styling features etc are all underbaked or incomplete.
3. This was the author’s first Rust project and definitely needs some refactoring love.
The author definitely recommends reporting any issues or feature requests. He’s also extremely appreciative of the fact that people use the tool and advocate it to other people on threads like this!
An IDE or a browser have a huge number of failure points.
Just starting up initiates large numbers of complex operations, file I/O, processing, database, graphics, platform specific operations, what not. They are in a way OS of their own.
Comparing a CLI application, that's scope is tiny compared to a full-blown IDE or a browser, is absurd!
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.
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.
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.
There were several of these in the early/mid-2010s and all had different drawbacks that made them awkward to deal with. Offhand the only one I remember the name of was BugsEverywhere: https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere
Some issues I remember in general (not all of these applied to all these distributed bug trackers) that caused them to largely be abandoned:
* No single view of cases: At least one of them was tied to the current commit, so a case could be resolved on a branch but not master
* No central view for non-devs
* Updating happened outside normal git operations so it was easy to forget to push/pull case changes
* One of them that avoided the previous issue made heavy use of branches to keep its data in the main repo, so it turned the repo into a mess
* Even if you did push/pull, updates aren't synchronous with a central location so it was totally possible for two people to assign a case to themselves locally and not realize it until later
It's probably pretty niche complaints but I didn't like how overly precise due dates were (every due date has precision down to the second), how recurring tasks worked, especially with cross device synchronization, and a few other small things.
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.
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.
Your bet is correct! These are considered `reports`. The default `task` view is called `next` (what are my next tasks), but there's plenty of others, plenty customization (sort order, filters, columns), for those built-in reports, and custom reports as well [1]
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.
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.
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? :-)
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.