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Todo.txt – A simple yet powerful todo manager for Linux

Recently, I discrovered todo.txt, a great todo list manager for people who feel comfortable with Linux’s command line.

The greatness of this tool is in its simplicity: the whole todo list is saved as plain text, and operations like adding/removing/prioritarizing/modifying/listing items are done through a very simple command line interface supplied in a bash script.

Other interfaces are also available, like Jabber/AIM bots, so you can achieve the same functionality through Google Talk (TM) or other IM clients. However, the command line interface is the easiest/coolest/most powerful.

Using the script is easy:

1. First you need to download a single bash script and a configuration file, you can find them in a zip archive here.

2. After you unzip the archive, you need to create a todo folder in you home directory:

mkdir ~/todo

3. Then, take the .todo configuration file from the extracted archive and move it to your home directory:

mv .todo ~/.

4. Edit the .todo configuration file and change the TODO_DIR variable into ~/todo

5. You may want also to change the colors for each priority in .todo configuration file (default colors assume a dark background for your terminal).

6. Take todo.sh and move it to /usr/local/bin so you can call it from any directory:

sudo mv todo.sh /usr/local/bin/.

7. Make todo.sh excutable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/todo.sh

8. Edit the first line in todo.sh so it looks like this:

#! /bin/bash

9. You may want to add an alias in your alias file:

alias todo=’todo.sh’

That’s it, now you can start using todo.txt:

1. To add an item to the list:

todo.sh add “Learn python”

2. It’s convenient to add tags to your items:

todo.sh add +programming “Learn python”

3. To list the items:

todo.sh list

4. To list items of a specific tag (eg. programming):

todo.sh list +programming

5. To assign a priority to an item:

todo.sh pri ITEM_NUMBER PRIORITY

where ITEM_NUMBER is the number appears to the left of the item when you use the list option, and PRIORITY is a letter between A to C (You can extend this in the configuration file).

6. To list all items with priority B:

todo.sh listpri B

7. To mark an item as done:

todo.sh do ITEM_NUMBER

8. To archive all done items into done.txt (done.txt and todo.txt live in ~/todo/ directory)

todo.sh archive

9. To replace an item:

todo.sh replace ITEM_NUMBER +programming “learn how to write python scripts”

There are few more options available, you can see them in todo.sh help:

todo.sh -h

There is also a nice video tutorial here.

Enjoy

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Tags: Command Line Interface, Linux, Productivity, Shell Scripts