Custom Checkboxes and Recurring Tasks Interactions

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I am having an interesting time getting custom checkboxes to play nicely with the recurring tasks feature of the tasks plugin. I have a bunch of custom task statuses, each with their own bespoke checkbox icons.

Naturally, it’s easy enough to change any existing checkbox in my vault from the default setting, - etc – to whatever custom status I wish to assign it to. This works great for non-recurring tasks, and gives me a visual overview of the various tasks I’m working on at a glance.

Where this method breaks down is with recurring tasks. Despite plumbing the depths of the relevant documentation for the tasks plugin, I believe i’ve run up against a limitation in the way it currently works.

When I complete a recurring task set with a custom status, say - [a], the new instance of the recurring task with be created with - and there’s nothing I can seem to do to alter this.

I’ve tried using templater to get it to automatically change the status of a specific task from - to - [a] upon creation, but this appears to break the recurrance rule.

Is there something else I can do – something obvious that I’m missing?

I’m really running up against the limits of my ability with obsidian right now lol – I am prepared to accept that what I’m doing simply doesn’t work with tasks as it exists today, even though it strikes me that it should be a relatively simple feature to implement to this plugin in the future.

Thank you for any help you can provide. And if it’s of use – I interact with my tasks though dataview queries, so if I can somehow get dataview to display the appropriate custom statuses, I don’t particualrly mind what’s going on in the backend.

Cheers, Tim :slight_smile:

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In essence if a task has any status characters it’s considered not any empty task, or in other words a completed task. This in turns triggers the tasks plugin to repeat the task if it’s a recurring task.

The only way I see around this is to somehow add your custom status to a undone list for tasks, so that it doesn’t create the new task, yet. But that’ll only be a partial solution, since the empty task is still just a space character as the status character.

When I’m using custom task decoration it’s mostly for informational use, or to denote something “historic”. Under this category I’m using it for partial completing tasks (aka BuJo notation (but never did so with recurring tasks)), or to record specific activities I’ve done (or are going to do at a given time). Neither of this are recurring.

I guess what I’m really saying is that if I were to use a custom status on a recurring task, I’m thinking I would use that as the completion status of it, and leave it empty when I’m about to do it. This do however mean that when the task is open you don’t see it custom status unless you use something else in addition to make it clear it’s a custom thingy.

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Hi holroy, thank you for this. It got the heart of precisely why I’m having trouble, and I’m inclined to agree with you based on what you laid out here that it’s simply not feasible in the way I’m hoping for. I can live with that haha, I was just hoping for a second opinion given my limited knowledge of the plugins involved. Thanks again :slight_smile: