There is a fork of taskell (a kanban board for the terminal) sitting in my GitHub from 2023. That was attempt one. My .taskrc says it was created on 2/2/2024, and Taskwarrior is the one that stuck, because it lives where I already am, the terminal.
The CLI is great, but day to day I live in taskwarrior-tui. And this September I ended up forking it, because I kept wanting it to behave like Linear.
First, the config does a lot
Before touching Rust, a lot can be done in .taskrc alone. These are the bits doing real work for me.
Custom fields (UDAs). Half my tasks are not mine to do, they are mine to chase. So every task can have an owner and a “from”:
uda.owner.type=string
uda.owner.label=Owner
# who asked for it
uda.from.type=string
uda.from.label=FromUrgency that knows whose turn it is. If I’ve replied or delegated something, it shouldn’t sit at the top of my list making me feel guilty:
# ball is in someone else's court: sink below own work
urgency.user.tag.replied.coefficient=-5.0
urgency.user.tag.delegated.coefficient=-5.0Tag it +replied and it sinks. When they get back to me, remove the tag, and it floats up again. Simple, and it keeps the top of the list for things I can actually do something about.
Contexts. work, personal, followup, and a me context that only shows things owned by me or not assigned yet:
context.me.read=( owner:me or owner.none: or project.none: )Time goes into timewarrior
Timewarrior ships an on-modify.timewarrior hook for Taskwarrior. Start a task, timewarrior starts tracking. Stop it, tracking stops. My copy has one extra line:
# taskwarrior-tui reads this tag to show time worked per task
tags.append(json_obj['uuid'])Every timewarrior interval now carries the task’s UUID as a tag. That one line is what makes the fork’s best feature possible.
What the fork adds
The fork lives on a branch in my taskwarrior-tui fork, about a dozen commits on top of upstream:
- A Worked column. The TUI sums timewarrior time per task UUID and shows it right in the list. No more guessing how long that “quick fix” really took. (Spoiler, it’s never quick.)
- Linear-style pickers. Press
oand a filterable popup of owners shows up, type a few letters, Enter, done.pfor project,Tfor tags,Dfor due,wfor wait. It works on multi-select too. - A Pomodoro tab, with 25/5, 50/10 and 10/2 presets, and break time logged to timewarrior as
break. - A Time tab with a weekly timewarrior report per day and per task, plus a chore picker for lunch, workout, standup.
- Fuzzy search across title, project, tags and annotations.
- A notes-style detail pane with clickable links, and
Eto edit notes in nvim.
The pickers are all config, no hardcoded fields:
uda.taskwarrior-tui.picker.o=owner
uda.taskwarrior-tui.picker.p=project
uda.taskwarrior-tui.picker.D=due:eod,tomorrow,2d,eow,10d,eom,eoq
uda.taskwarrior-tui.picker.w=wait:1d,3d,1w,2wattr alone pulls the values live from Taskwarrior. attr:list gives fixed presets. none clears it.
Shortcuts are just shell scripts
taskwarrior-tui can bind number keys to scripts, and it appends the selected task UUIDs as arguments. So most of my shortcuts are one line:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
task rc.confirmation=off rc.bulk=0 "$@" modify wait:1w1 parks a task for a week, 2 makes it due tomorrow, 3 tags it +comms. The fancier one is 5, which links all selected tasks to each other through a related field. Not a dependency, nothing blocks anything, just “these are about the same thing”. The fork’s detail pane then shows those related tasks by ID and description.
One fix went upstream
On Taskwarrior 3, taskwarrior-tui was dropping the first context in the list. My workaround was a fake “sacrificial” context at the top of .taskrc so the real ones survived. I sent the fix upstream, it got merged, and I deleted the hack. Best kind of commit.
The rest of the fork is way too opinionated to send upstream. That’s fine, that’s what forks are for.
If your todo app keeps getting abandoned, try one that lives in the terminal. Worst case, you fork it.
