written on Saturday, January 22, 2011
Taskwarrior isn't an application, it is a project. To quote from their website:
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, all while our international team provides excellent support!
So, yeah, the neat app I'm talking about is actually called task, but that's too hard to differentiate from anything else, since it's a dictionary word.
Anyway, I've been searching for a fast and easy to use TODO-list manager for a long time in order to move away from that dreaded-but-functional TODO.txt plain-text file in my homedir. And for the past month or so, I could say I've finally found a decent replacement.
Being able to quickly manage my tasks is a must-have for me, and by "quickly" I mean: without the need to use a mouse. Taskwarrior does just that, with added support for synchronization, tags, projects and calendaring. I can simply list my tasks for the day with task ls due:today (or the overdue ones with task overdue) and filter any kind of query command by project (pro:<NAME>), priority (pri:<H,M,L,N>), tags (+<TAG>) and many other modifiers (check the ATTRIBUTES AND METADATA section in the task manpage).
I could write several paragraphs about how many interesting features Taskwarrior has, but I'll direct you to their official tutorials instead. If you prefer watching over reading, make sure you check this introductory video out:
Being a command-line-only application, it's usage becomes really limited and it's quite impossible to do any sort of productive task management on a mobile device without a (proper) physical keyboard. Luckily this is bound to change (otherwise this would be placed under a "The Ugly" section) since there are plans to decouple the UI from the engine (I believe this'll be on the next release: 1.9.4), which will allow lots of front-ends to be created, which is great for I'll be able to develop apps for all those cool smartphones and gadgets that I don't have (the prices are plain stupid here in Brazil).
There are plenty of TODO-list managers out there, some with really interesting features and great visuals. If having your list accessible off-line in an easy way is not a requirement, there are several web-based tools out there to try out - I've used Google Tasks for a couple of months and it's quite simple (maybe too simple), a featureful alternative to Google's take on task management would be Remember the Milk. If GUI applications are your thing, maybe Evernote or Getting Things Gnome will be more to your liking.
But if you're like me and utterly dislike using your mouse, but Taskwarrior didn't suit your taste, another great option would be the more popular todo.txt, which has the advantage (not for long, I guess) of having mobile clients for IPhone and Android.
At long last a task manager I can use without feeling uncomfortable or limited! I've been using Taskwarrior daily, coupled with some sup mail hooks to trigger task creation and syncing frequently with my personal tasks stored on Dropbox and my work-related ones stored on my current job's cloud-like infrastructure. Make sure you try this one out if you're not completely satisfied with your current solution, even if you tend to prefer GUI apps.