Guake + screen + taskwarrior....

[pixel]

Three very nifty tools come together to make my (and your!) life easier. Or use them separately, it's all the same to me...

Guake is a 'dropdown' terminal in the style of Quake chat (for GNOME.) I'm not even a gamer and I love it. It's always there, ready for me with one keystroke. I tried Tilda as well but Tilda kept eating screen so that was a no-go. There are similar programs if you're running KDE but I'm not sure about XFCE.

There are tabs available in Guake itself but I can't make it NOT look clunky, so I buckled down and started re-learning screen. If you're a command line fan, give it a try, so many things available at a keystroke. The real magic is that I can disconnect and reconnect to screens on a whim. For example I cribbed and modified a script that launches a bunch of useful programs for RoR development in screen, so I have one project running in an instance of screen. I could launch another project in another instance of screen and flip back and forth. I could open up another terminal app and reconnect to my session there. I could go downstairs with my netbook, ssh in and reconnect to my screen there.

Finally the newest shiniest kid on the block: Taskwarrior (task) a super easy to use, flexible, feature rich command line todo list. This is the todo list I've been waiting for my whole life. See a basic demo on youtube. That's an older version (1.0, latest is 1.9.2) so there are a bunch more new features in more recent versions and it's still in active development.

So on any given day, I've got a screen session open for taskwarrior connected in Guake. My todo list is right there, and I can get to it anywhere with my netbook. I'm playing with getting tasks to show up on conky, if anyone is interested in that, I can let you know what I come up with. Now to tweak it and make it available off my home network....

Comments

[vass]

Those sound really cool, especially taskwarrior. Thank you!

[pixel]

You're welcome. I can't keep all the fun to myself ;)

[brownbetty]

Oh gosh, taskwarrior and I are eloping.

[pixel]

IKR? Where has this BEEN all my life?

[kerravonsen]

Hmmm, Taskwarrior looks interesting. I've been using DevTodo, but I find that more useful for software-project todos rather than general todo lists. I've also been using a personal wiki for organizing bigger projects because one can put one's notes and scribbles with it.

What I wish existed was task software that could double as a notes/outline/mind-mapping tool, and also be able to be updated by sending email... I guess I'll just have to work up a kluge that interacts with a wiki or something...

[pixel]

I end up using Tomboy notes a lot for those sorts of things, but I really wish there was something cli based that I could just ship bits and notes off too and organize later. I'm thinking for bits of things I learn (tricks I pick up) while coding. Taskwarrior lets you annotate todos, which might cover some of your use cases. I tried for a while to kludge Tombody and Getting Things GNOME into something that would work but it never felt as simple/easy as Taskwarrior.

(Icon: Blair! He was my first geek <3)

[kerravonsen]

Blair, yeah! Not a hard-science geek, but still a geek. Spock was my first geek, though. (Yeah, that's how old I am)

I started playing a bit with Taskwarrior today. I think I like it better than DevTodo, but I'm not sure if I could use it for everything. There's so much more that one can do with a wiki.

I'm favouring IkiWiki as a wiki because the way it uses revision-control (git is one, but can also use svn and others) means that one can update the wiki from the command-line with vim (vim file; git add; git commit; git push) as well as the usual way from the web.

And because the plugins are Perl, I find plugins very easy to write for it (longtime Perl hacker, me).

Which means it isn't beyond imagining that I might be able to hack together a script usable by maildrop (or some other mail filter) to be able to email myself a note, and have it added automatically to a personal wiki.