TaskPaper: Simple plain text to-do lists

5 August 2007

TaskPaper is a clean, text based to-do list manager from the maker of WriteRoom. It’s still early in development, but is already looking like a really useful tool. Since TaskPaper uses plain text files your lists are not locked in to the software - you can read and edit your tasks anywhere you can edit text files. I’ve got mine on on my Treo’s flash card so I can open and edit the file on the go (This doesn’t work perfectly - I think the problem has to do with file encodings - but this is still an 0.2 development release).

The file format is simple (and still being developed) and consistes of a few key symbols to indicate tasks and headings.

A heading ends with a colon:
A description is just a regular line of text.
- A task starts with '- ' on a new line.
- Here's another task, with a context: @next
- Completed tasks end with @done

I started thinking about ways the display could be improved without compromising the key point of difference of plain text files, and came up with this mockup.

Note: Mockup, the program shown below is based on TaskPaper, but doesn’t actually exist.

At the top I’ve added a standard unified toolbar with search field and a filter bar. I imagine the filter bar automatically picking up on the most common tags used, with the rest under the ‘More’ popup. The search field would highlight the search term everywhere in the document.

At the side I expanded on the use of round buttons instead of the usual checkboxes. The + and - buttons appear next to each list heading, and expand and collapse the list. The task dots can be colour coded based on the applied tags - in this example I’ve highlighted @waiting in orange and @next in green.

I’ve also started thinking about a way to bring the tasks into iCal, possibly using some of the code I wrote for my RSS to iCal script. It should also be fairly easy to write a parser for the format in php which you could run from your desktop. You could then build a web interface and access your lists from anywhere, like an iPhone for example.