Vit: Taskwarrior interface

Taskwarrior is a well-known and often recommended management tool. It’s a simpler (less features) tool than taskjuggler , but it covers most people needs. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, taskwarrior is like a ninja for your productivity: fast, stealthy, insanely flexible, and gone before you even notice it was there.

This tool can help you remember to buy milk or juggling 14 projects. Taskwarrior scales up (or down) to match your madness. It is methodology-neutral — meaning it supports how you work, not the other way around. It uses SQLite databases — human-readable, portable, and transparent, support JSON imports/exports, includes a DOM and Hook API for deep customization, comes with community-built extensions to suit nearly any workflow, can be accessed through a TUI… And that’s actually the real topic of this blog.

╭── Visual Interactive Taskwarrior (Vit)

Vit , while mentioning on the taskwarrior page itself, tends to be less commonly mentioned when you’re looking for a TUI. There’s several reasons why one would like to use a TUI. For me, it was to have a clean view of different reports in my tmux session (more below). Vit is giving you a more comfortable and intuitive way to interact with your tasks.
With vit, makes reviewing, filtering, editing, and organizing tasks easier without having to type out commands for everything. A great benefit is the real-time updates as you change tasks.

╭── Show reports at a glance

Since I’m using tmux, I’ve created a small shell script to split my terminal windows to display my custom taskwarrior reports, showing them only if they are not empty.
That way I have 2 main “screens”:

1. “Overview” layout

2. “Project” layout

╭── A more obscure alternative

The core of this blog is to shed some light on some overlooked projects. If you really don’t like TUI and want to stay in a full command line mode, I would recommend a Bash Simple Curses . This can also be an alternative if you’re not using a terminal multiplexer or a terminal that supports split windows.
This cli tool is not specifically to help you with taskwarrior, but allows you to create simple but interactive UIs for shell scripts that run in the command line. Coupled with its update feature, you can use keybindings to change views. The downside for me was that you lose taskwarrior’s colors, and panes don’t align properly (they adapt to the text content).

╭── Export your tasks to your calendar

I like to sync my tasks with my caldav. First, you have to be aware that you can sync your tasks with your calendar, but not the other way around. It’s only a one way sync. I suspect you could use a tool like ics2task but I didn’t see anyone implementing this option.
If few options exist to create ics events for your tasks, none was working for me. So, I quickly edited the old taskwarrior 2.0 export feature to get that done, and add features (i.e. adding taskwarrior annotations as comments in my calendar, and syncing tasks deletion with my calendar).