By Whitson Gordon Why You Should Set Up Your To-Do List in a Plain Text File (and How to Do It)
Why Plain Text?I've gone through more to-do apps than I can count, and I couldn't stand any of them. It felt like it took a million clicks to navigate to the app or web site and add or edit a task, and accessing my to-dos in other contexts—like displaying it on my desktop or on my phone as a widget—was very difficult since it wasn't compatible with other programs. In essence, I spent more time fiddling with the apps than I actually did doing things. Plain text files—most commonly files you create with the .txt extension—are like the universal language of desktop computers. It's the most basic file type around, stripped of all formatting and other complexities. And, unlike binary files (which only computers can understand), plain text files are readable by both humans and computer programs. It is, like the name implies, plain text. In fact, what makes plain text so great is that you can pump a text file into nearly any program, on any platform or device. Everything and everyone can read plain text (both humans and computers). Often, programs—including many desktop to-do apps—have their own special binary files they use for storing data, making them incompatible (or hard to translate) for other apps. Say you have a plain text file on your hard drive called todo.txt. You can manage it on any platform, with any text editor, and sync it with nearly any file-syncing service (like Dropbox). You can display your to-dos on your desktop with any program that can read text files, edit it with any number of programs that can handle plain text (these range from text editors like Notepad to more complex text-friendly to-do apps), and make it as simple or as complicated as you want it to be—whether that means a simple list of tasks or complex to-dos that include priorities, categories, and tags on each of them. While you can manage that to-do list from the text file yourself, editing your to-do list in a flat text file using an editor like Notepad.exe or TextEdit isn't the fastest or most ideal way to do so. As such, a number of excellent to-do programs have cropped up that work with plain text to-do files, including (but not limited to) TaskPaper/TodoPaper, Org-Mode, and our very own Gina Trapani's Todo.txt. Today, we'll show you how to get started with Todo.txt (our favorite plain-text to-do program) and show you all the things you can do with the resulting text file—like display it on your desktop, add it as a widget to your phone, and even synced to all my other computers via Dropbox. Note that Todo.txt is truly a geek's to-do list. You manage it from the command line and have to deal with editing config files to get it all set up. However, while there is a bit more work up front, it does actually make it faster and easier to manage your tasks if all you need to do is type a quick command and hit enter—there's no clicking, dragging, opening files, other other nonsense. However, if you prefer the mouse and want something with a GUI, you can use the same system with previously mentioned Todotxt.net, which is a bit more graphics-driven (but still takes advantage of all that plain text has to offer). And, no matter what system you're using, any plain text file can take advantage of our other plain text tricks, so take a gander at the last section of this article either way. How to Set Up Todo.txt
Once you've got your terminal program ready, head over to Todo.txt's home page and download the latest version. You should get a ZIP archive with two files in it: todo.sh and todo.cfg. Unzip these wherever you want. If you have a dedicated folder for scripts and the like, go ahead and unzip them there, or you can just put them in your home folder if you prefer. Just make sure both todo.sh and todo.cfg are in the same folder. These to files manage the to-do list; your actual to-do list is stored elsewhere in .txt format. Next, open up todo.cfg with your favorite text editor and edit the export TODO_DIR=`dirname "/cygdrive/c/Users/Whitson Gordon/Dropbox/Scripts/todo.txt"` Where export TODO_DIR=`dirname "/Users/whitsongordon/Dropbox/Scripts/todo.txt"` Obviously, edit the paths to match where you want to save your particular Todo.txt file. Save the config file and open up your terminal. cd ~/Dropbox/Scripts/ chmod +x todo.sh This command assumes you've put alias t='"cygdrive/c/cygwin/home/Whitson Gordon/Dropbox/Scripts/todo.sh"' On a Mac, you'll instead want to open up the hidden alias t='"/Users/whitsongordon/Dropbox/Scripts/todo.sh"' Restart your terminal app and run the following: t ls If you get an output saying How to Use Todo.txtAdding and editing tasks through the command line is super easy. To add a new task, just type something like: t add "Do Laundry" And, after adding a few more tasks, such as: t add "Pay Bills" t add "Install Skyrim" You can view all your tasks in a list by typing t ls You'll get an output that looks something like this: 1 Do Laundry 2 Pay Bills 3 Install Skyrim -- TODO: 3 of 3 tasks shown To edit or complete items, you can just refer to them by the number shown on this list. So, say you've decided Skyrim is more important than paying bills and doing laundry. You can give it a higher priority by typing: t pri 3 A
To edit a task, you can use the t replace 2 "Pay Water Bill" Similarly, if you wanted to add something to the end of the line instead of replacing it entirely, you could run: t append 2 "Online" Which would change the task to "Pay Water Bill Online". To complete that task, you can just run: t do 2 That's it! Todo.txt can do a few other advanced things, but we won't talk about them here. For more info, you can check out our original post on Todo.txt. Other Useful Things You Can Do with Your todo.txt FileNow that you've got your todo.txt file up and running, there are some nice tricks you can do with it to make it even more useful. Here are some of my favorites.
If you're a Windows user, you can display your to-do list on your desktop with Rainmeter. Assuming you already have Rainmeter set up, all you need to do is grab a "Notes" skin, as they often display a text file. What skin you use will differ depending on what suite your Rainmeter setup uses, but in general, all it involves is finding the config file for your Notes skin and giving it the path to your todo.txt file. Some suites, like Enigma, will ask for this file in their main configuration, instead of the Notes skins' config file, so check both if you're unsure. If you're on a Mac, you can use GeekTool to display your to-do list instead. Assuming you have GeekTool set up, all you need to do is open up GeekTool, drag a new "File" Geeklet to your desktop, click on it, and navigate to your todo.txt file under "File".
To do this in ResophNotes, just open up its settings and go to the Storage tab. Click the Plain Text File radio button, and give it a directory to save your files in. In Notational Velocity, go to Preferences > Notes > Storage, choose Plain Text Files from the dropdown, and choose your desired folder at the top of the window. Note that this folder is also where your todo.txt file will be saved, so make sure it's a good location for both. Then, just drag your current todo.txt file into that folder with your other notes, and be sure to edit your todo.cfg file to represent its new location. You may want to create a separate folder outside of your ResophNotes folder for your "done.txt", "report.txt", and temp file—and you can edit all this in your todo.cfg as well. Mine looks like this: export TODO_DIR="/cygdrive/f/Users/Whitson Gordon/Dropbox/Scripts/ResophNotes" # Your todo/done/report.txt locations
These are just a few examples of what you can do with your todo.txt file, but you're starting to see why plain text is awesome—you can really do anything with it. You don't have to deal with complicated scripts, APIs or other nonsense to sync your data back and forth—it's just a matter of finding a program that can read plain text and putting it to good use. Got any of your own clever tricks for a todo.txt file? Be sure to let us know about them in the comments. | November 15th, 2011 Top Stories
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Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Why You Should Set Up Your To-Do List in a Plain Text File (and How to Do It)
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