I want to change the status of a task quickly and easily. I am using the MacOs version of Obsidian.
The docs say I can Right Click, or Click and Hold over the status () indicator.
On my mac, Click and Hold does nothing, and Right Click (two finger click on my touchpad) brings up the standard context menu and not a list of statuses.
To change the status I have to bring up the Edit Task modal (which I have bound to Command L).
Can someone help please?
If you’re using the tasks plugin, I’ve found that right clicking the checkbox like you describe only works inside of tasks code blocks.
The manual for Obsidian says this should work. Is it a bug?
You tagged this post as “tasks-plugin” but you mention the Obsidian manual.
Are you talking about the Tasks plugin documentation, or the Obsidian help documentation?
Changing the status of a task depends a lot on how you’re viewing the task:
There also exists some plugins which allows you to change the task statuses between custom statuses, but the ones I’ve found so far do only work on the non-queried task lists.
In other words, if you’re not in source mode, you should be able to just click on the task and it should toggle between completed and open. If you’re looking at tasks from a tasks query, you can in addition also right-click and select from a predefined list of statuses. This list is also available in the Edit task modal, if you’re looking at a task in live preview.
The doc that I’m talking about is https: // publish.obsidian.md/tasks/Editing/Toggling+and+Editing+Statuses
Got it thanks. So to be clear, that is the Tasks community plugin, not the Obsidian manual. (Maybe you knew that, I’m just verifying.)
(Pardon if I’m repeating anything holroy said.) If you hover over the “right click” link, there is additional information that says it works in Reading Mode and Tasks Query Mode.
If you’re trying to do it in Live Preview, that might be why it’s not working for you. I tested it, and it does seem to work in Reading Mode. (Tested on MacOS and Windows.)
I used to use the “Task Collector” plugin which has a hotkey for cycling through custom task statuses. It has a command “Mark with next” and “Mark with previous” and you can define which statuses to cycle through.
Ok, I’m getting it now. I can change the status with a right click in a ‘tasks query widget’ created with “```tasks”. That does work properly.
I was trying to do it in the editor, where I can “left click” to toggle between done and todo, but there right click only shows a context window.
Do you know what kind of changes might be necessary to change the behaviour of right click in this circumstance. It that within the remit of a plugin, or is it not possible due to the architecture of Obsidian?
Ah, I knew it was a plugin, but because the docs are hosted within the main Obsidian website I didn’t make the distinction.
Is there any particular reason why it is not also supported in Live Preview? When I’m manipulating tasks that’s the mode I’m usually in. Currently it is difficult to change the status in this mode, because the tasks plugin protects the and it is almost impossible to cursor back and change it with the keyboard.
It’s possible to do from a plugin, but I don’t think neither Tasks nor Dataview is currently “interfering” with stuff outside of their respective query results. You could try posting in either of the channels I mentioned earlier (that is either github or discord) to see if you get any response related to the Tasks plugin.
With regards to the Dataview plugin, it’s not going to be done in the very near future, but it’s something I’ve been contemplating on whether it’s possible to do and how to include that properly within that plugin, or whether it should be a dedicated plugin which would target both Tasks query results, Dataview query results and/or ordinary tasks within the different modes.
This is where possibly other plugins like the Task Collector plugin or Task Status plugin, can truly shine and extend the handling of tasks outside of the queries.
Sadly, I’ve not found any suiting my needs so far, but do try both of them out, or any other task related plugin which might match your requirements.
Sorry, I couldn’t answer that. I’m not a plugin dev.
I will just add that personally, I gave up on trying to use custom statuses because they didn’t really add much value to me, and I would never remember which ones I was using, or which order they were in. So I ended up reverting back to just checked/unchecked which is easy to manage with a hotkey. And then some of the completed date stuff can be more automatic. (And I’m using Kanban and Projects for more detailed project management.) That’s just me.
Task Status does the job well enough for now. Thanks.
