gtd.py 0.6.15

A Fast Command-line Interface for Trello

A Fast Command-line Interface for Trello

This is a command-line tool that enables you to add, sort, and review cards on Trello rapidly. It is designed to reduce the amount of friction between your thoughts and your TODO list. If you never leave the terminal, gtd.py will feel right at home. It has tab-completion throughout, machine-readable --json and --tsv flags, a grep subcommand, and an interactive REPL mode.

The project is named “gtd.py” because it was initially built as a tool to maintain a Trello board using the GTD task tracking method. I’ve been actively using this tool for GTD since the first commit; if you’re trying to use GTD with Trello this is the tool for you.

Usage

In the following examples I’ll be working with a sample board, that I created like so:

$ gtd add board PublicShowTest
Added board PublicShowTest
$ gtd add list 'To Do'
Successfully added list <List To Do>!
$ gtd add list 'Weekly Tasks'
Successfully added list <List Weekly Tasks>!
$ for task in 'Do dishes' 'Clean bathroom' 'Write some python' 'Eat a sandwich'; do gtd add card "$task"; done
Successfully added card <Card Do dishes>!
Successfully added card <Card Clean bathroom>!
Successfully added card <Card Write some python>!
Successfully added card <Card Eat a sandwich>!
$ gtd show cards
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list  | tags | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes         | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:52.513000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Clean bathroom    | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:55.360000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
| Write some python | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:56.477000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7 | https://trello.com/c/p4yeGbkk |
| Eat a sandwich    | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:57.614000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6 | https://trello.com/c/HL9lJKgZ |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+

Looking Around

The show subcommand allows you to view what’s on your board right now. Let’s take a look around the new board.

$ gtd show lists
To Do
Doing
Done
Weekly Tasks
$ gtd show cards
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list  | tags | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes         | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:52.513000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Clean bathroom    | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:55.360000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
| Write some python | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:56.477000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7 | https://trello.com/c/p4yeGbkk |
| Eat a sandwich    | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:57.614000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6 | https://trello.com/c/HL9lJKgZ |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+

The show cards command will return all the cards which match your supplied arguments as a table, in JSON format, or in TSV.

# Show cards from the list "Inbox" matching a regular expression on their titles
$ gtd show cards -l Inbox -m 'https?'
# Show cards which have no tags but have due dates, in pretty-printed JSON format
$ gtd show cards --no-tags --has-due -j

Similarly, grep does what you would expect:

$ gtd grep dishes
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list  | tags | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes         | To Do |      |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:10:52.513000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
+-------------------+-------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+

It also faithfully implements some flags from GNU grep, including -c, -i, and -e! An invocation of this command is similar to a longer invocation of show: gtd grep 'some_pattern' is equivalent to gtd show cards -m 'some_pattern'.

# Filter all cards based on a regex
$ gtd grep 'http.*amazon'
# or multiple regexes!
$ gtd grep -e '[Jj]ob' -e 'career' -e '[oO]pportunity?'
# Use other popular grep flags!
$ gtd grep -ci 'meeting'

Creating Things

add takes care of your needs for creating new:

• Cards

• Tags

• Lists

• Boards

The add tag, add list, and add board subcommands all work pretty much the same way.

$ gtd add tag 'Household'
Successfully added tag <Label Household>!
$ gtd add tag 'Food'
Successfully added tag <Label Food>!
$ gtd add tag 'Programming'
Successfully added tag <Label Programming>!

The command you’ll probably use most frequently is add card.

$ gtd add card 'Purchase a pomelo'
Successfully added card <Card Purchase a pomelo>!

You can also specify a description for the new card with -m. New cards are put in the first list by default, so when you’re laying out a board, make your first list the “inbox”. You can also omit the title argument, like so:

# Open $EDITOR so you can write the card title
$ gtd add card
Successfully added card <Card This was written in vim>!

Manipulating Cards in Bulk

Frequently it’s useful to move a whole bunch of cards at once, tag cards that match a certain parameter, or do other single actions repeatedly across a bunch of cards. To accomplish this, use the batch command. All the subcommands of batch are interactive, so you’ll be prompted before anything is modified.

$ gtd batch tag -l 'To Do'
Card 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab
  Name:         Do dishes
  List:         To Do
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:52 (1534983052.0)
  Age:          0:02:04.641306
Enter a tag name to toggle it, <TAB> completes. Give "ls" to list tags, Enter to exit
tag > Household
Added tag Household
tag >
Card 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d
  Name:         Clean bathroom
  List:         To Do
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:55 (1534983055.0)
  Age:          0:02:08.795000
Enter a tag name to toggle it, <TAB> completes. Give "ls" to list tags, Enter to exit
tag > Household
Added tag Household
tag >
Card 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7
  Name:         Write some python
  List:         To Do
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:56 (1534983056.0)
  Age:          0:02:11.258759
Enter a tag name to toggle it, <TAB> completes. Give "ls" to list tags, Enter to exit
tag >
tag > Programming
Added tag Programming
tag >
Card 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6
  Name:         Eat a sandwich
  List:         To Do
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:57 (1534983057.0)
  Age:          0:02:13.094361
Enter a tag name to toggle it, <TAB> completes. Give "ls" to list tags, Enter to exit
tag > Food
Added tag Food
tag > ^C
Exiting...
$

A few things there - the tag names are auto-completed on a python-prompt-toolkit interactive prompt that’s case insensitive. Moving from one card to the next in this context happens with Enter, for speed of use reasons. Getting out of the interface was done with Control+C. Let’s put together this batch knowledge with some stuff we’ve seen already…

$ gtd add tag 'Shopping'
Successfully added tag <Label Shopping>!
$ gtd batch tag --no-tags
Card 5b7dfc27faa4645e373e9e59
  Name:         Purchase a pomelo
  List:         To Do
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:13:27 (1534983207.0)
  Age:          0:00:15.705034
Enter a tag name to toggle it, <TAB> completes. Give "ls" to list tags, Enter to exit
tag > Shopping
Added tag Shopping
tag >
$ gtd show cards -l 'To Do'
+-------------------+-------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list  | tags        | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+-------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes         | To Do | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:01.438000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Clean bathroom    | To Do | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:06.606000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
| Write some python | To Do | Programming |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:09.352000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7 | https://trello.com/c/p4yeGbkk |
| Eat a sandwich    | To Do | Food        |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:11.972000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6 | https://trello.com/c/HL9lJKgZ |
| Purchase a pomelo | To Do | Shopping    |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:47.890000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfc27faa4645e373e9e59 | https://trello.com/c/i7yvMTgD |
+-------------------+-------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+

Now we’ve tagged all those new cards in very few keystrokes! Let’s move them to more appropriate lists based on their status.

$ gtd batch move -l 'To Do'
Card 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab
  Name:         Do dishes
  List:         To Do
  Tags:         Household
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:52 (1534983052.0)
  Age:          0:03:41.454345
Want to move this one? (Y/n)
[a] Doing
[s] Done
[d] To Do
[f] Weekly Tasks
Press the character corresponding to your choice, selection will happen immediately. Enter to cancel
Moved to Doing
Card 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d
  Name:         Clean bathroom
  List:         To Do
  Tags:         Household
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:55 (1534983055.0)
  Age:          0:03:44.269575
Want to move this one? (Y/n)
[a] Doing
[s] Done
[d] To Do
[f] Weekly Tasks
Press the character corresponding to your choice, selection will happen immediately. Enter to cancel
Moved to Weekly Tasks
Card 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7
  Name:         Write some python
  List:         To Do
  Tags:         Programming
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:56 (1534983056.0)
  Age:          0:03:46.857946
Want to move this one? (Y/n)
[a] Doing
[s] Done
[d] To Do
[f] Weekly Tasks
Press the character corresponding to your choice, selection will happen immediately. Enter to cancel
Moved to Doing
Card 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6
  Name:         Eat a sandwich
  List:         To Do
  Tags:         Food
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:57 (1534983057.0)
  Age:          0:03:50.235275
Want to move this one? (Y/n)
[a] Doing
[s] Done
[d] To Do
[f] Weekly Tasks
Press the character corresponding to your choice, selection will happen immediately. Enter to cancel
Moved to Done
Card 5b7dfc27faa4645e373e9e59
  Name:         Purchase a pomelo
  List:         To Do
  Tags:         Shopping
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:13:27 (1534983207.0)
  Age:          0:01:24.753457
Want to move this one? (Y/n)
[a] Doing
[s] Done
[d] To Do
[f] Weekly Tasks
Press the character corresponding to your choice, selection will happen immediately. Enter to cancel
Moved to To Do
$

Here are some more ideas for you to play with:

# Find all cards with a URL in their title and move those URLs into their attachments
$ gtd batch attach
# Set the due dates for all cards in a list containing the substring "Week"
$ gtd batch due -l Week
# Change the due date for all cards that have one already
$ gtd batch due --has-due

Bringing It all Together

What if you don’t know what kind of action you want to take on a card before you invoke gtd? Well, we provide a nice menu for you to work on each card in turn. The menu is kinda REPL-like so if you’re a terminal power user (truly, why would you use this tool unless you’re already a terminal power-user) it’ll feel familiar. The menu is built using python-prompt-toolkit so it has nice tab-completion on every command available within it. You can type help at any time to view all the commands available within the REPL. If you get lost, use the help REPL command.

$ gtd review -l Doing
Card 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab
  Name:         Do dishes
  List:         Doing
  Tags:         Household
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:52 (1534983052.0)
  Age:          0:05:07.735033
gtd.py > description
# Editor session here
Description changed!
gtd.py > next
Card 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7
  Name:         Write some python
  List:         Doing
  Tags:         Programming
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:56 (1534983056.0)
  Age:          0:05:22.404917
gtd.py > duedate
Enter a date in format "Jun 15 2018", "06/15/2018" or "15/06/2018"
date > Aug 30 2018
Due date set
gtd.py > print
Card 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7
  Name:         Write some python
  List:         Doing
  Tags:         Programming
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:10:56 (1534983056.0)
  Age:          0:05:48.787922
  Due:          2018-08-30 04:00:00+00:00
  Remaining:    7 days, 3:43:15.067634
gtd.py > next
All done, have a great day!
$

Deleting Things

The delete subcommand allows you to get rid of lists & cards. By default, cards are archived rather than deleted. You can override this behavior with the -f/--force flag to delete cards. Lists may not be deleted, so they are archived when you run delete list.

$ gtd add card 'cannon fodder'
Successfully added card <Card cannon fodder>!
$ gtd delete cards -m cannon
Card 5b7e061d94997510c6ee0ce9
  Name:         cannon fodder
  List:         Weekly Tasks
  Created:      2018-08-22 20:55:57 (1534985757.0)
  Age:          0:00:14.543394
Delete this card? (y/N) y
Card archived!
$

Here are some other examples of delete:

# Delete without intervention all cards containing the string "testblah"
$ gtd delete cards --noninteractive --force -m 'testblah'
# Delete the list named "Temporary work"
$ gtd delete list "Temporary work"

Revisiting show

Now that we’ve added a lot more to our sample board, let’s try some more advanced examples of show cards. This command is the most flexible one of the bunch, so definitely try it out for yourself.

$ gtd show cards -t Household
+----------------+--------------+-----------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name           | list         | tags      | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+----------------+--------------+-----------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes      | Doing        | Household |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:39.081000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Clean bathroom | Weekly Tasks | Household |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:42.663000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
+----------------+--------------+-----------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
$ gtd show cards --by name
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list         | tags        | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Clean bathroom    | Weekly Tasks | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:42.663000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
| Do dishes         | Doing        | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:39.081000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Eat a sandwich    | Done         | Food        |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:51.535000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6 | https://trello.com/c/HL9lJKgZ |
| Purchase a pomelo | To Do        | Shopping    |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:47.890000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfc27faa4645e373e9e59 | https://trello.com/c/i7yvMTgD |
| Write some python | Doing        | Programming |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:47.048000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7 | https://trello.com/c/p4yeGbkk |
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
$ gtd show cards --by list
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| name              | list         | tags        | desc | due | last activity                    | board          | id                       | url                           |
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Do dishes         | Doing        | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:39.081000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8c5973738e1ed125ab | https://trello.com/c/DrZ2tFr0 |
| Write some python | Doing        | Programming |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:47.048000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb9051b9466d0da1c2b7 | https://trello.com/c/p4yeGbkk |
| Eat a sandwich    | Done         | Food        |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:51.535000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb91b7b7d66dcc7a21b6 | https://trello.com/c/HL9lJKgZ |
| Purchase a pomelo | To Do        | Shopping    |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:13:47.890000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfc27faa4645e373e9e59 | https://trello.com/c/i7yvMTgD |
| Clean bathroom    | Weekly Tasks | Household   |      |     | 2018-08-23 00:14:42.663000+00:00 | PublicShowTest | 5b7dfb8fed823c431514804d | https://trello.com/c/QVATaeaH |
+-------------------+--------------+-------------+------+-----+----------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+-------------------------------+

You can also filter the fields that are shown with the --fields argument. By default, gtd.py will trim down the fields until it fits your current terminal width. It’ll only wrap if you have really long card titles relative to the width of your terminal.

Setup

$ pip install -u gtd.py
$ gtd onboard

The onboard command will assist you through the process of getting a Trello API key for use with this program and putting it in the correct file. This will happen automatically if you run a command that requires authentication without having your API keys set.

If you’d like to enable automatic bash completion for gtd.py, add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

eval "$(_GTD_COMPLETE=source gtd)"

This relies on click’s internal bash completion engine, so it does not work on other shells like sh, csh, or zsh.

Configuration

The onboard command will help you create the configuration file interactively. If you prefer to do the process manually, Trello has a button on their website for temporarily creating an OAUTH key/token. Your API key and secret should be placed in a YAML file with the OAUTH key & token, like this example.

api_key: "your-api-key"
api_secret: "your-api-secret"
oauth_token: "your-oauth-token"
oauth_token_secret: "your-oauth-secret"

All four of these properties are required, gtd will fail to run without them. There are other optional settings you can define inside your yaml configuration file:

board: "Name of the Trello board you want to work with (case sensitive)"
inbox_list: "Name of the list for new cards"
color: True
banner: False
prompt_for_untagged_cards: True
prompt_for_open_attachments: False

Here are all valid configuration properties with explanations of their behavior:

Property	Default	CLI Override	Meaning
board	Latest board	-b	Name of Trello board to use by default
inbox_list	First list		Name of the list to place new cards
color	True	--no-color	Use ANSI terminal colors?
banner	False	--banner	Print an ASCII art banner on each program run?
prompt_for_open_attachments	False		Ask to open card attachments in gtd review
prompt_for_untagged_cards	True		Ask to tag cards without any tags in gtd review

This configuration file can be put in a variety of locations within your home folder. The onboard command will help you with platform detection, putting the configuration file where appropriate given your operating system. When running, gtd` will check all possible locations out of this list:

• ~/.gtd.yaml

• ~/.config/gtd/gtd.yaml

• ~/Library/Application Support/gtd/gtd.yaml

• ~/.local/etc/gtd.yaml

• ~/.local/etc/gtd/gtd.yaml

Contributing

Contributions would be great! If you think something could be improved just go change it and ask!

There are some tests for the command-line interface to make sure everything works properly. There are currently a few subcommands fully covered with more planned. To run these tests, first use the “onboard” command to create a configuration file. Then add a property test_board to the configuration file, with the name of a board you can dedicate to running these tests. The tests will destroy an existing board. Then, run:

make tests
# OR,
python -m pytest tests/

I use black to format the source code but keep some of my conventions kept in this source since the beginning. I’ve been using single-quotes for strings and wrapping at 120 character line length, so I use the following command to do the formatting. Please apply it when giving patches.

make black
# OR,
black -l 120 -S gtd.py todo/ tests/

Notes

• The code is lightly tested. Please (please!) report bugs if you find them.

• This has only been used on Linux and Mac OSX

• Windows is not supported.

• Some naming conventions differ from Trello, most notably “label” is called “tag”

License

BSD. There is a copy included with the software as LICENSE

Copyright 2019 Jamie Luck (delucks)