busy 1.0.0

Command-line task and plan management tool

Busy

A task and plan management tool, for use from the terminal prompt on Linux and MacOS systems.

Installation

pip3 install busy

Getting started

Add some tasks to your queue.

busy add "Take a shower"
busy add "Do the laundry"
busy add "Phone mom"
busy add "Donate to the Busy project"

Find out what to do next:

busy get

Returns:

Take a shower

When you're done, mark it off to find the next task.

busy delete; busy get

Returns:

Do the laundry

See the whole queue, with sequence numbers.

busy list

Returns:

1  Do the laundry
2  Phone mom
3  Donate to the Busy project

Decide to do the top task later.

busy drop; busy list

Returns:

1  Phone mom
2  Donate to the Busy project
3  Do the laundry

Decide to do a specific task now.

busy pop 2; busy get

Returns:

Donate to the Busy project

Push that task to tomorrow.

busy defer --to tomorrow

Get all the tasks scheduled for today.

busy activate --today

Core Commands

• add adds a new item to the bottom of the queue. The item description may be included after the command or written to stdin.
• get gets the top item in the queue, referred to as the "current" item. There are no options.
• list lists the items in the queue in order with their sequence numbers.
• pop moves a task or set of items to the top of a queue.
• drop moves a task or set of items to the bottom of a queue.
• delete permanently removes a task or set of items from a queue. Deletion requires confirmation via input or the --yes option.
• manage opens a text editor to edit items.

The list, pop, drop, delete and manage commands allow the designation of specific items.

Item designation can be performed using sequence numbers or tags.

Sequence Numbers

Sequence numbers appear in the output from the list command. Note that the numbering starts with 1, and is not an ID -- the number of a item will change when the queue is modified. So always reference the most recent output from the list command.

When used to designate items, a range of sequence numbers is separated by a hyphen, with no whitespace, and is inclusive. For example, 4-6 designates items 4, 5, and 6. A hyphen without a number after it includes all the items from that item to the end of the queue. A hyphen on its own indicates the last item in the queue.

Tags

Items can have tags, which are space-separated hashtags in the item description. A task can have no tags, one tag, or more than one tag. For example the following item description has the tag "errands":

go to the supermarket #errands

The hash itself ("#") is omitted from the command line when designating items by tag.

Item Designations

Item designations appear after the command. For example, the following command will move all the items with the #errands hash to the top of the queue.

busy pop errands

Whitespace-separated item designation criteria are additive -- that is, a logical OR. For example, the following command will delete all the admin tasks, sales tasks, and tasks 3 and 4.

busy delete admin sales 3 4

Below are some further examples of task designations by sequence number.

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.

Items will always be handled in the order they appear in the queue, regardless of the order the criteria are provided. So for example, if a pop command designates some items, they will be moved to the top of the queue in the order, relative to each other, they currently appear in the queue.

The sequence numbers in the list command output are from the queue itself. So the list command does not modify the sequence numbers, even when item designation is applied.

Commands that accept item designations support logical defaults, which are:

Command	Default item(s)
list	All items
pop	Last item
drop	First item
delete	First item
manage	All items

Alternate Queues

Busy will manage any number of queues. For example, you might have a shopping queue for items to buy at the store, and a movies queue for films you'd like to watch. The default queue is called todo and has special properties related to planning.

To designate an alternate queue, use the --queue option on the command.

busy add "Skimmed Milk" --queue shopping
busy get --queue movies

Managing Plans with the defer and activate commands

The default todo queue supports several specific commands related to planning -- that is, scheduling tasks for the future. Planned tasks are kept in another special queue called plan.

There are two commands related to plan management.

• defer removes a task or set of tasks from the todo queue and schedules it or them to reappear at a future date in the plan queue.
• activateremoves a task or set of tasks from the plan queue and replaces it or them into the todo queue.

The defer and activate commands accept item designations. The defer command deals with the todo queue; its default is the top item in the todo queue. The activate command deals with the plan queue; its default is all the items scheduled for the current date or earlier.

Planning is by date, not time, and is relative to the current date according to the system clock.

In the defer command, the date can be specified using the --to or --for option (they are interchangable). If the options are omitted, then the date can be provided as input.

The date may take any of the following forms:

• A specific date in YYYY-MM-DD format, such as 2018-10-28
• An integer, a space, and the word day or days, such as 4 days, which will defer the item to that number of days from today
• An integer without a space and the letter d, such as 4d, which is a short form of 4 days
• The word tomorrow, which is also the default if no date is provided

As an example, the following command will defer tasks 4, 5, and 6 from the todo queue to the date 4 days from today, keeping them in the plan queue until that date.

busy defer 4-6 --for 4 days

Note that the plan queue is keeping the task information (verbatim from the todo queue) along with the date information (as an absolute date).

To pull tasks off the plan queue and put them back on the todo queue, use the activate command. There are two ways to use the activate command:

• With the --today option, which is the normal way, and activates all the tasks scheduled for today or earlier, bringing the todo list up to date
• With designated items from the plan queue

If no items are designated, and there is no --today option, no tasks will be activated.

Projects and the start command

Another special feature of the todo and plan queues is the start command, which deals with projects.

If a task 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 top item in the todo queue). The command basically combines steps:

• Calls activate --today so the active task list is up-to-date
• Calls manage on the project, to edit the list of tasks for the project
• Calls pop on the project, so its tasks are at the top of the list

Details of the manage command

The manage command launches the user's default text editor to directly edit a queue or part of a queue.

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.

The default use of manage will edit the entire queue.

busy manage --queue movies

But it's also possible to designate tasks to be managed. The manage command does its best to replace the edited items in place in the list order. So if you manage the current project (in which all the tasks are at the top), then the edited tasks will still appear at the top. Even if you add tasks, they will be inserted after the last task in the managed set, not at the end of the list. But all the tasks brought up in the editor will be managed. So if you remove a task in the editor, it will be deleted and the others will be moved up to take its place.

Data storage

Busy keeps the queues in plain text files, so if the tool doesn't do something you want, you can just edit the files. The files are in a directory together, referred to as the "root". Each file is the name of the queue with a .txt extension. If a required file is missing, it will be created automatically. So typically, the root includes todo.txt, plan.txt, and any number of custom queue files.

Technically, they are pipe-delimited data files, though todo.txt only has one field (description); plan.txt has only two fields (date and description), and there is no support for managing separate fields in the Busy tool itself.

The root is designated in one of the following ways, which are tried in order.

• The --root option on the command
• The BUSY_ROOT environment variable, if no --root option is provided
• A directory at ~/.busy, which will be generated as needed if no --root option or BUSY_ROOT environment variable are provided,

Note that the --root option must come after busy but command-specific options (--yes, --to, --for, --queue, and --today) must come after commands.

The following example shows the --root option with command-specific options on the same command line.

busy --root ~/.config/busy activate --today

Note that Busy does not support concurrency in any form. If two commands are executing at the same time, they may overwrite each other. Overwriting is especially risky with the manage command, which keeps the user's editor open until they close it.

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