Keeping a todolist in plain text

After discovering the todo.txt manager by Gina Trapani from lifehacker I decided to give it a try. All todo-applications annoyed the hell out of me, even though I really do like a good GUI. It just never did what I wanted to do, involved a lot of mouse-clicking and most of the time took too much time to set up and adjust to my needs. I don’t mind using a mouse, but using only a mouse makes my arm hurt.

The project has since moved to todotxt.com and I joined the mailinglist. My version has a few additions the current official version doesn’t have and I’ve uploaded the .diff.

The most important changes I made:

- Removed the need for a temporary file
- Items marked as ‘done’ get ‘x:done <date> ‘ in front of them. I prefer x:done over just plain x, x:done immediately means ‘marked done’ in my brain
- The x:done part gets stripped when archiving / reporting.
- The reportfile has a year attached, so it looks like report2006.txt
- The donefile gets created per week, looking like 2006-25.txt
- Creating multiple lists by using symlinks. I use ‘manager’ as a name for the script, and created symlinks to keep a shoppinglist and a todolist seperately (ln -s manager todo). The archive directory and the lists use the linkname to create the names, running ‘todo’ means it checks ‘listtodo.txt’, running ’shop’ means it checks ‘listshop.txt’
- The script does not yet create the archive directory, this needs a ‘mkdir archives/shop’ (or todo or whatever)
- Pretty outlining:

 1 do laundry
10 wash windows
 5 hoover

It all should ‘just work’ but be sure to backup your existing copy of your todo-list and your todo.sh.