Tasks

Proof of concept for a simple task queue, with a focus on UX and clean internal design.

Tasks can be installed through pip: pip3 install tasks, run with tasks.

Status for i3

Follow these steps to add the output of status to your i3 status bar.

1. Set up a cron job (crontab -e) that saves the status every minute.

   * * * * * /path/to/tasks status > $HOME/.tasks.status
   

2. Configure i3 to use the provided status wrapper (installed alongside the tasks command.)

   ...
       status_command tasks-i3status
   ...
   

Ubiquitous Capture

It is very useful to have a quick and low-friction way to add new items from anywhere. This can be achieved by combining tasks with a generic dialog tool and your window manager keybindings.

Example using zenity and i3:

bindsym $mod+t exec --no-startup-id bash -c "zenity --title 'Add TODO item' --text 'What needs to be done?' --entry --width 450 | xargs tasks addt"

Note that you will want to use tasks >= 2.7.0 for this since it detects external modification of the state file.

Automatic standup email

The standup command shows (among other things) recently completed items. One use case is to send this list to your phone to have it ready for a daily standup. The repo contains a script (under scripts) to send stdin as an email with Mailgun which you can then combine with a cron job as follows.

API_KEY=...
DOMAIN=...
EMAIL=...
30 9 * * tue,wed,thu,fri /path/to/tasks standup 1 | /path/to/mailgun.sh
30 9 * * mon /path/to/tasks standup 3 | /path/to/mailgun.sh

Development

To get started, have a look at the todo items for this project.

make dev_install  # one-time setup
make todo

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Please do keep in mind that the code is heavily inspired by the Elm architecture and consider the following guidelines.

• Avoid mutation whenever possible, take advantage of PEP 448 to create updated versions of collections instead.
• Side effects (and only side effects) should be in main.py; all other modules should be limited to pure code.
• Avoid classes unless you have a really good reason for them (the code does not have any classes at the moment.)