Making tasks/todos a first-class citizen

[bepolymathe]

There is also imdone whose idea is very good but which annoys me for two main reasons:

• the price (25$ for version 1.X)
• the rather closed license

Slated and Review are useful but don’t be too demanding in terms of date combinations, tags assigned to multiple people, etc.

But it’s clear that using Obsidian makes you want to note spots where you’re typing a note (and therefore think about it. Sometimes it’s in a daily note, sometimes not.

[lastobelus]

Over the years I’ve tried a variety of task managers & notebooks and nothing really clicked for me until I started using this VSCode plugin.

It’s a lot of little things about this plugin that come together to make it work well for me:

• todos are in git with the project. This makes it easy to use git log/blame to discover context of todos if I forget what I meant when I wrote them
• ad hoc, arbitrary hierachical structure, in a plaintext (almost markdown) format.
• choice of symbols: I use the unicode ☐ symbols, but the plugin can be configured to use many different alternatives including the markdown [ ], [x]
• adding a : at the end of a line makes it a section. Sections can also be nested arbitrarily. The plugin tracks the total number of unfinished tasks are under any heading (the number in parentheses in the screenshot)
• You get the VSCode outline view and breadcrumb for easy/fast navigation. It also comes with it’s own outline sidebar that consolidates all your file & embedded todos.
• automatic datetimestamps when you mark an item complete. You can also start a time tracker on any given line, but I don’t use that feature
• syntax coloring so it matches whatever theme I’m using in VSCode that day
• keyboard commands for everything
• you can add estimates with @1h or @est(1 day and 3 hours), and the section headings get a total estimate, automatically
• it all remains completely editable with any text editor
• you can embed todo lists in your source files

I honestly can’t think of how I would improve on it, and I think everything it does would work very well in Obsidian (of course Obsidian would want to enforce the markdown format).

[elwc]

There is this plugin called Checklist. It depends on whether your tasks are in your daily notes only (this works well) or they are just everywhere (not so well). Dataview is more powerful and you can surely do it. Except this needs more knowledge and studying.

[WhiteNoise]

Aside the many plugins that now try to handle tasks. There will be some support for tasks as first class citizen in 0.12 both for users and for developers. I am gonna mark this as closed and any futher request should be specific and in a new thread.