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An Outline Extension for Todo.txt

Background

todo.txt is a way of organizing your tasks by plain text files.

todo.sh is a way to manage such files from the command line.

Introduction

outline is a extension to the todo.sh tool that converts outlines into the todo.txt format, using indents to imply either dependency or inheritance relationships.

For example, it converts this (sample.ol.txt):

(A)
  +project.whales
    write report on whales
      research phase
        reserve books about whales at the library
        read book 1
        read book 2

      complete analysis
        find data on whale migration patterns
        import data into computer
        do the magic

      write up findings

@buy
  (B)
    game console
    cables
    controller

  (C)
    television

into this (sample.todo.txt):

(A) +project.whales reserve books about whales at the library; research phase; write report on whales
(B) @buy game console
(B) @buy cables
(B) @buy controller
(C) @buy television

Notice that tasks that are children of projects/contexts/priorities or a combination of them inherit them. Alternatively, tasks that are children of other tasks make them dependent. In this case, the task 'read book 1' won't show up in the todo file until the 'reserve books…' task is complete, and tasks under 'complete analysis…' won't show up until all the research phase tasks are done.

This extends todo.sh to serve as an organizing tool for task breakdowns or project management.

Updates

A few additions have been made to the format of *.ol.txt files over time.

First is the divider: ---. Anything after the divider in an *.ol.txt file will be ignored. This is space for notes and a scratchpad for the outline.
Done tasks get collected into the global done.txt file in your todo repository.
Tasks now show their parenst in addition to themselves. This is to get around the issue of multiple tasks that may have the same 'raw' text. Take this outline file for example.
```
Chemistry Essentials
   chapter 1-3 @read due:2029-02-20
   chapter 4-6 @read due:2029-03-05

Mathematics for adults
   chapter 1-3 @read due:2029-02-20
   chapter 4-6 @read due:2029-03-05
```
In this case, the tasks from the second book would marked as duplicates. Instead, we store each task as follows, which ensures that each task has unique raw text. It also gives some context to the task.
```
task text; <parent task text>; ... @<contexts>... +<projects>...
```
The information overload is a slight issue, but I find that I read the beginning and ending of lines more closely that the middles, so it's not much of a problem.

Properly Deleting Tasks

when finishing tasks, if the task is archived before outline is run again, we are adding it back to the *.todo.txt file. This can be worked around for the time being by completing and removing tasks from both the todo file and the ol file at once.

Let us work on fixing this issue. So what do we need to do? Whenever we complete a task, if there is an outline file (*.ol.txt) for the todo file we are editing, we need to propagate the change to the outline file.

Most, if not all of the time when working with outlines, we are not working on our main todo file todo.txt but some other subject specific file, like learn.todo.txt. To complete tasks in these files, we already have a custom command df, that works like the default command do, but takes an additional argument for the file to act on. So for example, if we want to complete task number $4$ in learn.todo.txt, we can run t df learn 4.

Thankfully, we have already stubbed out where we need to call into our outline script. We will make a new subcommand called __df that we can hook into. It will accept similar arguments as df, so borrowing from the previous example, running t df learn 4 will call t outline __df learn.ol.txt 4.

outline works by keeping all the tasks in a local SQLite database. This is the source of truth that we use to keep tasks in sync between outline files and text files. So, the first thing we need to do is look up the task. One of the invariants we rely on is that all tasks have a unique raw text. This is the text of the task with all projects, contexts, due dates, etc. stripped away.

Once we've parsed out the raw text, we can set completed = True and sync this task to the db. This is straigtforward since we already have a function sync_task that takes care of most of the details. We simply parse the line in of the todo file that we are interested in, and sync_task will look the task by it's raw text, and update the completed status.

Next, we need to sync the change to the outline file. We find the line in the outline that that has the matching raw text and mark it as complete. After flushing out some bugs, it seems like everything is working now.

Reference

Repository: bitbucket
Stack: GraphQL, SQLite, python, graphene (python)