Busy

A command-line task and plan management tool.

To install:

pip3 install busy

Introduction

Busy is a system for keeping track of tasks. Some of the guiding philosophies:

• There are "active" tasks, which is an ordered list of things to work on (also called "todos"), and there are "plans", which are things that have been deferred to a specific future date
• The "current" task is the top of the "active" task list, so it's the thing to do right now
• Everything is based on a POSIX command line interface, making it easy to use from the terminal prompt on Linux and MacOS systems
• Data is stored in easily edited files, so if the tool doesn't do something you want, you can just edit the files

Commands

The main command is busy.

Otherwise, the first positional argument is a command, which is one of the following.

Tags and the start command

Tasks can have tags, which are designated with space-separated hashtags in the task description, for example:

go to the supermarket #errands

Tags can be used in task designation, for example:

busy pop errands

A task can have no tags, one tag, or more than one tag. If it has tags, the first tag is considered to be its "project" for the purposes of the start command.

The start command is used to start work on a project. If an argument is passed to the command, that's the chosen project. Otherwise the chosen project is the project of the current task. The command basically combines steps:

• Calls activate --today so the active task list is up-to-date
• Calls pop on the project
• Calls list on the project

Editing the tasks directly with the manage command

The manage command launches the user's default text editor to directly edit tasks. Note that it only works with active tasks (not plans) and that once the tasks are edited they will be dropped to the bottom of the list.

Busy uses the sensible-editor command to select a text editor, which works with default Ubuntu Linux installations and might or might not work with other operating systems.

Designating tasks

For some commands, it's possible to designate tasks to be acted upon. Designating tasks is always optional.

Tasks are identified by number, which is the line number of that task within the list of tasks. It's easy to see the numbers of tasks using the list command. Note that the numbering starts with 1, and is not an ID -- the number of a task will change as the active task list is reordered. So always reference the most recent list.

busy list lists all the tasks

busy list 5 shows only task number 5

busy list 3-7 shows tasks 3-7

busy list 3- show tasks 3 through the end

busy list 3 5 7 9 shows the tasks designated

busy list - shows the last task

busy list -4 is an error! Use busy list 1-4 instead.

busy list admin list all the tasks with the #admin hashtag somewhere in their description.

Task designation criteria are additive -- that is, a logical OR. So:

busy list admin sales 3 4 will list all the admin tasks, sales tasks, and tasks 3 and 4.

Note the result is always in the order the tasks appear in the queue, regardless of the order the criteria are provided.

Command line options

Deferral

Deferral is about scheduling a task to reappear on the task list on a future date. To defer a task, you have to designate the date using the --to or --for option (they are interchangable). Some options:

• 1 day or 1d Tomorrow (the default) - can also write tomorrow
• 2 days or 2d The day after tomorrow
• 2018-10-28 A specific date in YYYY-MM-DD format

Example:

busy defer 4-6 --for 4 days

Piping to the add command

Task descriptions always come from stdin. To read from a file, try:

cat list-of-tasks.txt | busy add --multiple

Data storage

Tiger requires a "root", which is the directory containing the two data files:

• todo.txt - active tasks
• plan.txt - future tasks, with dates

Technically, they are pipe-delimited data files, though todo.txt only has one field.

How to tell busy its root (in order)

• The --root option
• The BUSY_ROOT environment variable
• Otherwise, ~/.busy which will be generated as needed

The "root" setup allows you to have separate task queues for separate projects.

Development

Although it requires Python 3.6.5 or higher, Busy is designed to function with the Python standard library without any additional pip modules.

However, we use coverage during unit testing, so:

pip3 install coverage

Then to run the test suite:

make test

Or to run test coverage:

make cover