command_liners | Guake + screen + taskwarrior....

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....