Wednesday June 22, 2022; 11:46 AM EDT
- One of the constants in my life is a fascination with different todo management applications across the variety of platforms I use. A challenge is managing todo items for my job apart from my personal life. I find for me that the topic is less about managing my time (being productive, deciding what to do when) and more about remembering and keeping track of things I think I need to do. Consequently, for me, I realize what I really do and need is an application that makes it easy for me to create and manage lists and I don't really need all the bells and whistles of most of the applications like Things and Omnifocus.#
- It also has dawned on me that it might be wise to think in terms of the data, which leads one to file formats and "markup," and that lead me back to todotxt.org/">todo.txt. Todo.txt is a specification for creating and maintaining lists in plain text files. Gina Trapani is the original author and she created the specification to manage todo items using command line tools. Gina was motivated to use tools that were fast and within the work environment in which she spent most of her time, which was a command line. #
- A lot of activity occurred in the early 2000s in developing applications on a variety of platforms, most of them used Dropbox for storage and synchronization of the text files. todotxt.net for Android might be the closest to an "official" application and it was last todotxt.net/releases">released in 2019. Given that todo.txt is really a plain text specification, any text editor can be used. What I found, and I have been using, is the todotxt-mode">VS Code extension todotxt-mode that provides me with a set of actions that I can use to manage items in my todo.txt files using VS Code. #
- At work I am storing the files in a directory that synchronizes with Onedrive, but I am really only editing the files on my work computer. My personal todo.txt files are stored in a private Github repo which I then clone and synchronize with remote computers. I am mostly using a containerized version of Code Server to edit the files using VS Code in a web browser but I can also access the files on my iPads using Working Copy. Github is not a seamless background synchronization tool but it works good enough for me at this time. #